King’s Corner
It’s not just academic.

Producers of audio material (for example, educational or motivational CDs) have a writing task not unlike that faced by speakers. They seek to prepare for the delivery of solid information in a conversational manner. Because of that, Brian Clark’s post concerning “Four Copywriting Techniques for Engaging Podcasts and Audio Presentations” comprises useful ways of thinking about a speech and “writing” it.

When we teach speech students about evaluating sources, we usually tell them that government figures are more reliable than others. We teach journalism students the same thing. Maybe the operative word here is “more” and “than others.”

The greater lesson, perhaps, is to be skeptical of anything that any source tells you until you see the original data and understand how it was gathered and what it means.

As FOXNews reports in The Myth of 90 Percent, a “fact” that has been floated around by a whole bunch of government officials and passed on uncritically by a number of media outlets is just flat wrong, i.e., the “fact” that 90% of the guns used in Mexican crime comes from the United States.

It’s not just a little wrong. It’s a lot wrong. A more accurate way to look at the facts is this: about 17% of recovered weapons used in a crime in Mexico could be traced to the U.S. (more…)

Copyblogger has a short article entitled How to Tell the Truth?. It fits very well with the approaches we recommend in speech class about supporting material and dealing with a hostile audience.