In this video, we will talk about sources. More particularly, we will talk about citing sources, or as many people refer to it, referencing sources, in your formal presentation. The good news is that citing a source in a formal presentation is far more relaxed than referencing that source in an English paper.
When you cite a source in a formal presentation, you want to give the appearance of you being relaxed and conversational. informal. That's not the case in a formal paper, but that is the goal of a public speaker. So the thing you don't want to do is make this thing look like a book report. So there's a general rule of thumb that every speaker should follow when it comes to citing a source that they're going to use to back up some of their supporting material.
And that rule of thumb is this. Whenever you cite a source, you should give the audience all the information that is necessary for them to easily access that information on their own. That's it. I'll repeat it.
Give the audience all the information they need to go out and access that information easily themselves. Does that mean you give the full citing every time you deliver a source? No, but the first time you deliver it you give the full bit of information.
But if you're going to refer to that source a second time or a third time or a fourth time, all you have to do is is give some subtle reference to it because you've already given it to them in full. So what are the four different types of sources that you need to know about for backing up the supporting material that you use for your speech? They are the periodical. That means your information has come from something that comes out periodically, like a monthly magazine or a weekly magazine or a quarterly report or a biannual report or even a...
an annual report. That would be a periodical. The second one would be a book. Another source that you can get your information from would be testimony.
In this case, that means you are actually delivering the words that come straight from the mouth of the expert. And we will talk about citing sources that you gather from a website or from various websites. Let's talk about the periodical first. Let's assume that you've been giving... your speech, you're past the introduction, you're well into your first main point, and bam you've just hit them with your first form of supporting material.
It might be a statistic, it might be a quote, or even a cartoon visual aid. You've given them that supporting material, now it's time to give credit to the person who established that bit of support and give credibility to you and your main point by citing that source in full. So here's the information I'm going to give you since it's the first time I'm citing the source and I have to give all of it, I need to give you the title of the periodical. I need to give you the issue date of that periodical. I need to give you the title of the article from which you will be citing.
I need to give you the name of the person or the entity, research group or whatever, that you'll be referencing in that citing. And then I need to give you the information itself. Now that's a lot of information.
With the periodical, you do have to give more information than you do with the other three. So I'll give you an example of how that works. I'm moving along in my speech. It's time for me to reference that first source and it comes from a magazine, say a monthly magazine. I would give the following information and mind you, you don't have to give it in the same order that I'm telling you right now, but all of this information needs to make its way into the presentation.
I might start off, I might deliver it like this. according to a March 2019 issue of U.S. News and World Report in an article entitled, Youth in a Raging America, Professor Mary Stanfield of Harvard University states, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Now you see I gave all that information.
If you're an audience member, you can go straight to that. You can actually Google it with your thumbs in real time and see if what I'm telling you is worth buying into. All right. Now let's. to say I'm moving along a little further in my presentation and I have a bit of information that comes from another source and maybe it's contradicting the first one that I gave you.
And it's a, let's call it, say it's a periodical as well. And it's the first time I'm using it, so I have to give the full citing. I would start off, according to a May 2020 issue of Newsweek, magazine in an article entitled rage discomfort and chaos in a universe of decline police chief harry gates of the chicago precincts believes blah Now you see in both examples I gave the full sighting because I used them both for the first time.
However, in my discussion, in my presentation, I'm going to show how the professor and the police chief contradict one another or combat one another or something throughout the presentation. I come back to the professor and I'm going to cite her words again. I don't have to give the full listing that I gave the first time. for U.S. News & World Report.
I just have to give some subtle reference. Professor Mary Stanfield disagrees with the police chief, however, when she says blah blah blah. Or I might say the U.S. News & World Report article disputes the chief's finding because it believes blah blah blah. I just gave a subtle reference to something I already cited in full.
Both times, the time I cited the reference in full and the time I just barely referenced the professor's name. or in general the name of the magazine, U.S. News & World Report. Both examples would give the audience all the information they need to go out and easily access that information themselves.
With a book, it's different. As a matter of fact, you don't have to give as much information when you cite a book as you do a periodical. And there are reasons for this.
In a book, obviously you give the title of the book. You give the name of the author of that book. the page number from which you will be citing, and then the information itself. That's it.
The first time you use that book as a source, you give those items. Title, author, page number, and then the information itself. You might ask, okay, why give the page number? in a book and not just give the page number in a periodical. Well, it looks like this.
Periodicals, magazine articles, for example, are very condensed, two, three pages long, quite often. And, you know, an audience member... should really read the entire condensed bit of information in order to get your quote or your citing in full context. Books are this thick.
Books are way too long to expect an audience member to go read the entire book to get a quote in full context. So you give them the page number and you put it on them to go back you know to that page number and go back far enough into the reading to determine context so that they see how that piece of information that you gave them from the book applies to your message. The third type of source that you might cite is testimony.
Now that should sound familiar to you because in our previous video, we listed testimony as a form of support. Now we're listing testimony testimony as a source. Well, there's a reason for that. If testimony is actually using the words that come straight from the mouths of an expert, well, that's a bit of supporting material for your main point.
And since you're getting it from that end, expert. It's also the source. So testimony is the word we use for supporting material and a source. And if I'm going to back up one of my main points by using the words of an expert, a scientist, or a professor, or a political figure, or something like this, here's the information I need to give the first time I use that person.
Because again, the first time I use them, I need to get the full sighting. The information would be the name of that expert, that source, their title and title is a little uh gray in this regard we all wear different hats many hats in our lives we have many titles sometimes uh you might be you know, a co-worker at PECO. You might be an administrator at PECO. You might be a Little League baseball coach at the same time, and you might be a Boy Scout leader.
at the same time. So what I'm getting at is there are many titles that can apply to you. So when you choose the title that you use in referencing your testimony, make sure it's the title that coincides with the theme of your speech.
Now, if they are really high on the social ladder, it doesn't hurt to give some higher title as well, but you need to reference the title that pertains to your subject matter. So so that it helps give your... Message credibility. So you've got the name of the person, the source, whose testimony that you're using, their title, then you need to give a contact number.
like an email address, mailing address, you know, a business address, even a phone number, usually a work phone number, unless of course that person insists that you give them the private number, but you want to give them some number so that they can contact them if they needed to get some kind of clarification, some kind of foundation in understanding how your use of their words gives credibility. to your message. That's the testimony.
And after testimony, we have the website. This one's a little tricky. Students will often stand before a class, and when they get information from a website, they'll say, I got my information from Google. That doesn't work. Google is not a reference.
of specific information Google is the house that you go to discover that information so if you went to a website and you went to Google and you found yourself getting a piece of information off of CNN's website or out of an article out of the New York Times because you could pull it up on your phone or something like that. That's the entity that you cite, CNN or New York Times or something like this. So if it's New York Times, you would treat that as a periodical and you'd give the full citing. If you're going to take them to a website because maybe you didn't see the newspaper article on the web, you actually are looking at a new source that lives only within that site there's a couple of things to look at you can give the full website if it's somewhat of an unknown entity if it's kind of a small little known entity yeah it's a good idea to give them a full website I often tell people when we first started a little theater downtown called the downtown playhouse and I was trying to promote it I would give people I would tell them hey go to down downtown playhouse. Wasn't a good idea.
At that time, you click in downtown playhouse, man, you would come up with dance clubs and Dallas and everything else, you know. So I realized right away, I need to give the full website to the playhouse, which was the downtownplayhouse.com, so they can type that in and go specifically to the right spot. However, if what I was discussing were a...
well-known entity, I mentioned CNN a while ago, and you got that information from them, you could say, just go to CNN's website and click on blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Why? Because CNN is large enough, you click on it, you find the homepage, you click on that, and they go. But if it's a little-known website, give the full citing so that they don't accidentally come across something, you know, get some information that they think is from your source when actually...
it belongs to something else.