It's a good idea to stay informed about the world around you. One way that you can do so is to download news apps to your smartphone or other mobile device.
The following websites also have news apps commonly available through cellphone providers. Consider downloading some of them to your mobile device. Otherwise, find an article from one of these news sites that you would like to use for your current event speech.
BBC News - A British news service with an international outlook founded in 1922.
Fox News - A 24-hour cable news channel based in New York City.
CNN - A 24-hour cable news channel based in Atlanta, Georgia.
Univision Noticias - Spanish-language news service broadcasting continuously since 1981.
Washington Times - A daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C. since 1982.
Daily Caller - A Washington, D.C.-based news site operating since 2010.
NPR - National Public Radio, which is a national network of public radio stations partially funded by the US government.
Noticias Telemundo - Spanish-language news service headquartered in Miami, Florida. It provides news with an emphasis on Latin America and the United States.
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.
Your first step is to search through the database Credo Reference. The video below teaches you how.
The next step in database searching gets complicated. So we have created this video specifically for the task. The video shows you how to search the three databases listed below the video.
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.
