Using Evidence in a Speech
At this point, you’ve spent plenty of time gathering evidence and then organizing your thoughts. Now it’s time to start crafting your speech, backing up your claims with the research you’ve done. How exactly you go about using your evidence in your speech will depend on the type of speech you’re giving.
For Platform Speeches
After researching for a platform speech, you should have a number of different decks of cards, one per source you’ve consulted. Each deck should consist of a citation card, five credibility cards, and numerous evidence cards. Here’s how each type of card factors into your speech.
Evidence Cards
As you’re writing up your speech, you’ll reach a point where you want to include one of your pieces of evidence to back up your point. To do so, mention the source, and then incorporate the evidence into the flow of the text. You don’t have to use the wording on the card verbatim unless you’re wanting to preserve a direct quote from the original source. For instance:
Josh McDowell indicates that Matthew’s gospel was likely composed in the early to mid-60s AD, because Irenaeus records that it was written when Peter and Paul were preaching and founding the church in Rome.
Note that this example only includes the author, which may be sufficient, depending on how well-known the author is, and the specifics of the evidence included. Other times you may wish to include the published work as well. E.g.:
In Evidence that Demands a Verdict, Josh McDowell indicates that Matthew’s gospel was likely composed in the early to mid-60s AD, because Irenaeus records that it was written when Peter and Paul were preaching and founding the church in Rome.
In either case, at the end of the sentence, you’ll want to insert a footnote, and then down in the footnote include the abbreviated citation from your card (e.g., “McDowell, Evidence, 43.”). The footnote will be the only place the evidence’s location (i.e., page number) appears, and the footnotes will not be spoken by you when reciting your speech—they’re just there in case anyone wants to question your sources.
Credibility Cards
More often than not, the information on your credibility cards will not wind up in the speech itself. However, if the evidence you’re presenting might be perceived as controversial or hard to believe, it will likely be worthwhile to include a summary of your credibility information alongside the evidence itself. For instance:
Matthew’s gospel was likely composed in the early to mid-60s AD, because Irenaeus records that it was written when Peter and Paul were preaching and founding the church in Rome. This comes from Evidence that Demands a Verdict, one of most influential books of the latter half of the 20th century, written by renowned evangelical apologist Josh McDowell.
The Citation Card
Finally, for each of the sources you wind up using in your speech, you’ll need to include the full citation from the citation card in a bibliography at the end of the speech. As with the footnotes throughout the text, the bibliography won’t be recited by you when speaking, but is included for when you need to point others directly to your sources of information.
Once you’ve completed your speech, you’ll also need to go back through all the footnotes and replace the first abbreviated citation per source with the full citation. This means the full citation will appear in two places in your document: (1) in the first footnote from the source, and (2) in the bibliography. All other footnotes for the same source will only use the abbreviated citation.
For Limited Preparation Speeches and Debates
After researching for limited preparation speeches or debates, you still have a bunch of note cards, but they’re not organized into decks per source as for platform speeches above. Instead each card should contain a tag line, the full citation, a statement on the qualifications of the source, and then the verbatim quote itself. When it comes time to integrate one of these pieces of evidence into your speech, you don’t just read each component of the card, one after the other. If you did so, it would be a jarring experience for the audience. Instead, you’re going to want to work it into the flow of the speech more naturally, following the pattern below.
- Lead-In
You likely don’t want to jump right into your tag line. Instead you’ll want to introduce your piece of evidence in the context of where you are in your speech. How does what you are about to say connect to what you’ve said up to this point?
- Tag
Once you’ve transitioned from where you were in your speech to this new piece of evidence, state the tag line. Feel free to change it up a bit to fit where it falls in your speech nicely. You still want it to be short, sweet, and to the point, but it doesn’t need to be an exact match of what’s on your card. If people are taking notes, this is what they’ll write down to remember what you’ve said.
- Source
After hearing the tag line, your audience needs to know who’s behind the evidence. When stating the source, you only really need to include where it’s from (e.g., the name of the journal), and when it was published. You want to have the rest of the citation on hand if your sources are called into question, but you don’t want to include the rest of the citation details in the speech itself. Depending on the evidence, it may also be worthwhile to include the source’s credentials here too.
- Evidence
Once you’ve sufficiently introduced the piece of evidence, you’re ready to read the evidence itself. The recommendation would be to copy the whole contents of the quote into your document, but then make the parts your intend to speak bold. You want the whole context of the quote there on the page for your reference, but in the context of where you are in the speech, you might not want to read the entire thing.
- Conclusion
Finally, it’s not sufficient to simply read a quote from someone else that you think is pertinent to the point you’re trying to make. Conclude with a sentence or two summarizing the quote in your own words and making clear its application to your point.
Note
This pattern of including evidence in a speech is akin to the usual “tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you told them” mantra.