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This short video will talk about how to test your evidence
so should you be trusting what you're reading or not. Basically what we're talking
about will be questions you should ask yourself as you're reading things, especially things
like websites
or things you find online.
These are the types of question you should ask yourself to make sure you have
high-quality sources
so there's eight questions to ask yourself
first ask yourself "what's the purpose of this site?"
is the purpose to advertise to you? Is it to try to sell you something
is it trying to
persuade you and others who are reading this or watching this information to
believe certain things
think about what the purpose of the site is
and is that going to be something that's going to impact the quality of the information?
second you want to think about the bias or the objectivity of the website
some websites from newssources or magazines
clearly have some kind of
a bias. for instance if you're reading a publication put out by the National
Rifle Association you can guess they probably have some bias towards
certain types of gun control laws
that's not necessarily a bad thing, it's just something you need to keep in mind as you're
using that evidence or not using that evidence in the body of your speech
Third, you want to consider the expertise of the actual evidence
While Donald Trump might be a expert in some fields like business or
things along those lines
he may not be an expert in something like how to remove somebody's appendix
so you wanna make sure the expertise of the source is actually there
additionally if you're looking at someone's blog and you're considering if you should
be citing this person's information, consider if that person is a
credible blogger. Is this a blogger that's associated with ESPN.com?
are they affiliated with something that has a larger amount of credibility?
Or is this
Uncle Bob's blog
and why should we trust we trust Uncle Bob and his blog and what he thinks?
Fourth, we need to think about accuracy. Are the things we're reading
in this evidence
the same things we're reading in other pieces of evidence? if one website tells you
exactly what you're looking for
and every other website out there says "nope, that's not the case"
that one website you found may not be an accurate website for you to use
so you may decide that you need to find
a different source or that your
conclusion that you reached is not necessarily accurate accurate
So you want to think about that when you're examining your evidence. How does it compare with the other sources out
there
You want to look at when the evidence was published or put forward or
done
so if you're looking at a research article from 1990
that may not seem to be such a long time ago but you think about it that's almost
twenty five years ago
and the idea that something has changed between nineteen ninety and
now is
probably pretty
substantial the changes that might have happened
for instance if you are looking at something was published in nineteen
eighties about AIDS and how AIDS has transmitted, it's going to be
different than than the information we're going to be reading about in 2013
so think about
if the timeliness of information in your article is
going to be impacting
the quality of the evidence you provided
Number Six: The relevance of the sources
Is the evidence you're actually talking about relevant to what you try to argue
or what you're trying to convince your audience to believe
That's going to be an important thing to think about and I think
most people can get that pretty quickly
is there evidence sufficient so is the evidence you're providing going to be
enough to convince your audience that there's a problem
Finally
You want to think about
is your evidence being presented in context
if you're trying to pull a statistic from an article about homelessness
that says
that
twenty seven percent people in
floyd county have a drug problem (I just made that statistic up, I didn't actually find that statistic anywhere)
and the article is about hopelessness but you're talking about the drug related information
and your speech isn't about homelessness it's about drugs
that would not be information that's been taken in context. you wanna go
back and try and find out where
this homelessness article found the information about drug information
in Floyd county
and you'd want to find that original article instead
think about these eight questions as you go through and read different articles or are
looking at different websites
to make sure that the evidence you're presenting in your speech is actually
going to be high quality