Depending on the source of your support all the

Depending on the source of your support, all the following information could be useful: name of source,
location of source, date of source, name of author, and identification of author. First, you need to tell
your audience the name of your source. Whether you are using a song or an article from a magazine,
you need to tell your audience the name of the person who wrote it and its title. Second, if your source
comes from a larger work, you need to include the location of the source. For example, a single article
(name of source) may come from a magazine (the location). Third, you need to specify the date of the
source. Depending on the type of source you are using, you may need to provide just a year or the day
and month as well. You should provide as much information on the date as is provided on the copyright
information page of the source.
Thus far we’ve talked only about the information you need to provide specifically about the source; let’s
now switch gears and talk about the author. When discussing the author, you need to clearly explain not
only who the author is but also why the author is an expert (if appropriate). Some sources are written by
authors who are not experts, so you really don’t need to explain their expertise. In other cases, your audi-
ence will already know why the source is an expert, so there is less need to explain why the source is an
Stand up, Speak out 232

expert. For example, if giving a speech on current politics in the United States, you probably do not need
to explain the expertise of Barack Obama or John Boehner. However, when you don’t provide informa-
tion on an author’s expertise and your audience does not already know why the source is an expert, your
audience will question the validity of your support.
Now that we’ve explained the basic information necessary for using support within a speech, here are
two different examples:
1. According to Melanie Smithfield in an article titled “Do It Right, or Do It Now,” published in
the June 18, 2009, issue of Time Magazine …
2. According to Roland Smith, a legendary civil rights activist and former chair of the Civil
Rights Defense League, in his 2001 book The Path of Peace …
In the first example we have an author who wrote an article in a magazine, and in the second one we
have an author of a book. In both cases, we provided the information that was necessary to understand
where the source was located. The more information we can provide our audiences about our support,
the more information our audiences have to evaluate the strength of our arguments.
Execution
Once we have set up the support, the second part of using support is what we call execution. The exe-
cution of support involves actually reading a quotation, paraphrasing a speaker or author’s words, sum-
marizing a speaker or author’s ideas, providing numerical support, or showing pictographic support.