COM 352WI: Communication & Social Influence: Getting Started

Before you can start searching for sources on your topic, it's important to gather as much background information as you can about your speech, album, or film. There are a variety of background questions you'll want to ask yourself:

• Speech Name/s (Does the speech have multiple names? What is it normally referred to as?)
• Specific Dates (Day/month/year of the speech, film, or album/song)
• Current or historical events referenced in the speech/movie/album (What are the events being talked about? What dates did those events occur?)
• People (What other people are mentioned? Did any people inspire the speech, film, or album/song?)

There are a variety of places you can search for answers to the questions above:

• General Internet Searching (Google, Wikipedia, online encylopedias, etc. can help you gather background information)
• Books/Biographies (Check the library for a book or biography about your speaker. Books can be a great source for general background information on a person or event.)
• Articles (Look for summary articles -- scholarly, magazine, or newspaper articles -- about the speech, film, or album, to gather additional information about how it was written.)

Here are some tips for searching on the library website:

• Start with simple keywords, like the speaker's name and the name of the speech.
  • Depending on the amount of results you get, you can add additional keywords to get more specific results.
• When searching in library databases, connect multiple search terms with connector words, such as AND, OR, or NOT
  • Ariana Grande AND Pete Davidson (searches for results that include both terms)
• To do an exact word search, put multiple words in quotation marks. This tells the database that the results have to include those exact words, in that order. This works well with speech titles, for example: Martin Luther King Jr. "I Have A Dream" speech
• Use the Date filter in the database to only look for articles that were published from one year or a specific span of time.