Week 4 — Prove It Out Loud: Sources, Statistics, and Oral Citations — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 4 of the term — judge the sources behind your next speech, write oral citations an audience can trust, and explain to a cousin why "studies show" is not a source.

This week you learned the three kinds of supporting material, the five-question credibility checklist, how to read a statistic in words, and the oral citation that names who, what, and when before the evidence. In this assignment you work four short problems on the week's models, explain each one, judge and cite the real sources for a speech you will give, sort your own supporting material, and explain all of it to someone who has never taken a speaking course. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Speech Workshop practice the same ideas from other angles.

The task

This week's shared example is the mini-source set: the running speech's three real sources. The running speech, an informative speech on food waste in a campus dining hall, and its speaker are illustrative and attributed to no one; the sources are real:

• a government page: the U.S. Department of Agriculture's "Food Waste FAQs" (no dated stamp; it cites the department's Economic Research Service and a 2010 estimate)
• a peer-reviewed article with a DOI: Wenhao Zhang and Junehee Kwon in the journal Sustainability, December 2022
• a news article with a named author and date: Dee-Ann Durbin of the Associated Press, writing for PBS News, December 2022

Chapter 4 runs all three through the five-question credibility checklist (currency, relevance, authority, accuracy, purpose), turns each into an oral citation that names who, what, and when before the evidence, and walks an illustrative, official-looking wellness site and an illustrative chatbot exchange through the same checks.

Work these four problems, and show how you reached each one:

1. The running speech runs each of its 3 sources through all 5 questions of the credibility checklist. How many checks is that in all?
2. The running speech has 3 oral citations, and each one names 3 parts (who, what, when). How many parts are named in all?
3. The illustrative wellness site passes 1 of the 5 questions on the credibility checklist. How many questions does it fail?
4. Asked for sources, a chatbot returns 3 citations, and only 1 of them is found at the original. How many citations are dropped?

Beside each answer, add one brief explanation, and use the sources for your own next speech for the parts that ask for it:

• Problem 1: choose one real source you plan to use. Answer all five checklist questions with evidence from the source itself, give a keep-or-drop verdict, and name one independent source you used to check its main claim.
• Problem 2: write two complete oral citations for real sources you found. Each names who (with a clause on why they are credible), what, and when, in the sentence before the evidence. Label the three parts in each.
• Problem 3: list three pieces of supporting material you plan to use and sort them as an example, a statistic, and testimony. Say whether the testimony is expert or lay, and why. If any example is hypothetical, show how you will flag it as invented.
• Problem 4: in the illustrative chatbot exchange printed above (you do not need to open any tool), explain why the unfound citations are dropped, and why even the found one is still checked for whether it says what the chatbot claimed.

Explain it to a non-expert

Your cousin is preparing a two-minute pitch at their apartment building's tenants' meeting for a covered bike-storage room and plans to say, "Studies show bike theft is way up." Write a 3–5 sentence message that explains, in everyday words, why to say who found it, where it was published, and when, before the number; how to check the number first; and one limit, such as that a source can be real and still not say what you need it to. Explain any course term in everyday words. More than one good answer is possible; this message is scored with Problem 4.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a coworker getting ready for a restaurant staff meeting who plans to say, "Experts say we should change how we store leftovers." Model answer: "Before you say 'experts say,' find out which experts and where they said it, because your coworkers will want to know whether to trust it. If it's a health department page, say so first: 'Our county health department's food-safety page says…'. Check that the page is current and that it actually says what you heard. And keep in mind that a rule from one place may not match ours, so ask the manager which rules we follow."

Use that pattern for your cousin, with your own wording and examples.

Show how you got each answer. A reader should be able to check every count and every label without guessing which numbers you used.

Deliverables

Submit a single piece of work containing:

• the four answers, each with the arithmetic shown and the brief explanation the task names for that problem;
• your checklist run for one real source, your two oral citations with their parts labeled, your sorted supporting material, and your critique of the chatbot exchange; and
• your message to the cousin, explaining in everyday words why to name who, what, and when before the number, how to check the number first, and one limit.

Keep it to roughly one to two pages. Clear and specific beats long. Every source you cite must be one you found and opened yourself.

Choose how you show it. Present your work as written text, or as a spoken explanation recorded as audio or video of about three minutes with a transcript. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: find and open your sources, do the counting, the checklist, the citations, the explanations, and the writing yourself, without any AI tool. Problem 4 asks you to critique a printed, illustrative exchange; you do not need to open any tool to do it. Submitting AI-generated work as your own, citing a source you never opened, or copying another student's work is an integrity violation under the course policy.

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