Exercise 1: Quotation for your Topic

To test your detective skills use www.yahoo.com to find this quotation by baseball fan, syndicated columnist, and TV pundit George Will: "Football features two of the worst aspects of American Life, violence and committee meetings." Can you use your detective skills to find an apt quotation for your own topic?

Exercise 2: Narrowing a Topic

Narrowing a topic is an important step in speech preparation because you will be able to better know and understand a smaller universe of information.

To demonstrate to yourself how much information you have to know with a very broad compared to a very narrow topic, use a search engine of your choice (e.g., www.northernlight.com) and see how many sources appear as you move from Cancer to Breast Cancer to lumpectomy. Now go to www.jama.ama-assn.org where you will find free, full-text articles on medical issues to see if you can narrow the topic even further.