“Prove it to me.” When someone makes a claim, you don’t always accept it at face value. Sometimes you want to know more details. You want to know how they reached their conclusions and where they’re getting their evidence from. This evidence, in turn, has to be trustworthy. “I read it on the internet” has become a punchline.

In the same way, your audience wants to know how you arrived at the argument you’re making in your speech. The audience will judge your credibility from the beginning of your speech through the end. Based on the content you deliver, and how you deliver it, they’ll decide if they trust you enough to support your cause.

In this section, we’ll look at how to collect and analyze evidence for your speech, and how to package it in a way that your audience can digest.