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7: Supporting Ideas and Building Arguments

  • Page ID
    174354

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    • 7.1: Learning Objectives and Key Terms
      This page details learning objectives for integrating support into speeches, defining support and its significance. It discusses evaluating support criteria, the use of statistics, definitions, examples, narratives, testimonies, and analogies. It distinguishes reliable from unreliable support and underscores the importance of support for claims.
    • 7.2: Crafting Supporting Ideas
      This page addresses the common occurrence of unverified claims made by various individuals, emphasizing the need for credible evidence and context. It encourages the use of fact-checking resources such as FactCheck.org, Politifact.com, and Snopes.com. The chapter underscores the importance of supporting claims in presentations to enhance the strength of arguments in speeches.
    • 7.3: Using Research as Support
      This page discusses the importance of "support" in public speaking, which includes strategies to provide evidence that develops a central idea and enhances a speech's purpose. Effective support clarifies content, boosts credibility, and makes speeches engaging and memorable. It emphasizes the need for authoritative, relevant sources to maintain credibility, highlighting that poor support can weaken a message.
    • 7.4: Exploring Types of Support
      This page emphasizes the significance of stipulative definitions for clarity in communication, particularly in public speaking. It explores various support types such as facts, definitions, examples, narratives, testimony, and analogies, highlighting their roles in engaging the audience. The text notes the value of eyewitness testimony while warning of its unreliability due to biases and inaccuracies.
    • 7.5: Using Support and Creating Arguments
      This page discusses effective public speaking strategies, emphasizing the importance of using a variety of evidence types, including facts and testimonies, to support claims. It highlights the need for clear connections between claims and evidence, ethical use of information, and the avoidance of excessive support. Strategies such as paraphrasing, summarizing, and using visual aids are recommended. A reverse outline can help ensure claims are well-supported.


    This page titled 7: Supporting Ideas and Building Arguments is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Sara Kim, Douglas Marshall, June Pulliam, Victoria VanNest, and James Yeargain (LOUIS: The Louisiana Library Network) via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform.