Gathering background information is an important step for any topic you're studying in your Speech course. This is called pre-research.
Pre-research will provide you with a good understanding of a broad topic so you can identify keywords, narrow down the topic, and form a thesis statement or research question.
For example, interpersonal communication is a broad topic! Think about more specific types or categories of interpersonal communication, like:
Google can be a good tool to help you identify more keywords. You’re just looking for ideas and inspiration at this point, not sources.
As you do your pre-research, be sure to take notes! Seeing your keywords written down can help you make connections between keywords and ideas, which may then help you form a thesis statement and identify supporting arguments or evidence.
Online reference books (eBooks) are helpful for finding background information because they contain a lot of information about your topic all in one place. eBooks can be found in our library databases and are available at any time without a library card. Here are just a few of our eBook databases to get you started.
Gale eBooks offers broad cross-curricular collection of non-fiction titles, supporting science, geography, history, language arts, business and other subjects. Optimized for search and discovery, the Gale eBooks platform enables you to search through multiple nonfiction eBooks within a single search.
Multidisciplinary collection of nearly 700 titles that introduce topics in an accessible way.
For more eBooks, please visit our A to Z Databases and sort the database Types by eBooks.