Gathering and organizing material

2. Types of Sources

In most cases, you will need to decide which pieces of information are truly relevant to your topic, and which ones to discard. The most important strategy should be to simplify, so that from a large quantity of data you obtain good quality materials.

The success of your presentation depends, to a large degree, on the quality of your information. Sometimes it is enough to rely on your own knowledge about the topic, but most often you will need to examine information from other sources. You may also want to illustrate certain points of your presentation and include personal anecdotes, real-life situations or hypothetical situations.

In general we divide our sources into primary and secondary. Primary sources supply you with first-hand information; they may be interviews with experts in the field or surveys done for different purposes. Secondary sources are parts of basic reference found in the library (books, encyclopedias, dictionaries, newspapers, magazines, etc.) or parts of the internet (news archives, government information, expert blogs, etc.)