To search the databases effectively, you need to develop keywords. This video explains what they are and how to do so.
Now let's think of ways to structure your keywords in ways that reflect the topics for the informative speeches, which is the most complicated of the speeches to research.
For the top 10 How I Built This, consider the name of a famous company and the founder, such as:
For the top 10 Most Dangerous Jobs, consider the name of the job and the word 'safety':
For the 10 Best Designed Buildings in the World, write out the name of the building and the city that it's in:
To find articles for your persuasion speeches, you will need to access the library's databases. If you don't have recent experience with our library's databases, then I suggest first watching this introductory video.
The next video shows you how to search Issues & Controversies, which is the database in which you will find the articles that you need for your persuasion speeches. Each of the topics that Dr. Cooley has listed refers to a title of a specific article, so search for the chosen topic, word for word.
Finding information for your informative speech topics is a bit more challenging than the persuasion speeches. But we have the resources at the library to help you.
Above is a video that teaches you how to search the library's discovery tool, which you can find on the library's homepage. This is tool that you can use to search the library's databases and catalog at the same time.
The video suggests limiting your search results to scholarly journal articles published during the last five years. Do not do this. Do not put any limits on your searches for the informative speech assignment.
It is important that you select your keywords--your search terms--prudently. Start by searching with very broad keywords, such as:
It might be necessary to use more specific keywords. For example, I found that searching for Sagrada Familia was too vague. It returned too many irrelevant search results because many places are named Sagrada Familia. But I did some Googling and found that the most famous Sagrada Familia is in Barcelona. So I searched the library discovery tool for:
It may be necessary for you to experiment with different keywords. I tested each informative speech topic and found that there is enough information in the library to compose speeches on each of them.
This is our video that introduces APA documentation. I urge you to watch the entire video carefully before starting to write your paper or annotated bibliography. It is much easier to cite correctly as you go along, rather than try to fix your documentation after you have written your paper.
This is our complete APA guide, which goes into more detail about citing sources and formatting correctly.
It includes our sample paper. When you're writing a paper, you can model the formatting of your paper after this one.
If you are unsure how to set up the formatting in Microsoft Word so that it fits the requirements for APA formatting, you could instead download this blank Word document that has the formatting already set up for you.
