Chapter Eight

1
Chapter Eight
Developing Supporting Material
2
Chapter Eight

• Table of Contents
• Examples
• Narratives
• Testimony
• Facts and Statistics

3
Developing Supporting Material

• Supporting materials perform three functions
• Illustrate/clarify points
• Elaborate on an idea
• Prove something is correct

4
Examples

• Examples illustrate, describe, or represent
  things, making them more concrete and meaningful.

5
Examples

• Brief Examples
• Extended Examples
• Hypothetical Examples

6
ExamplesBrief Examples

• Brief examples offer a single illustration of a
  point.

7
ExamplesExtended Examples

• Extended examples offer multifaceted
  illustrations of the idea, item, or event being
  described.

8
ExamplesHypothetical Examples

• Hypothetical examples refer to something that
  could happen in the future if certain things
  occurred.
• Asks What if?

9
Narratives

• Narratives are stories, both real and
  imaginative.
• Fairy tales
• Legends
• Religious narratives
• Myths

10
Narratives

• Essential elements
• Plot
• Characters
• Setting
• Timeline
• Anecdote a short story of an interesting,
  humorous, or real-life incident.

11
Testimony

• Testimony firsthand findings, eyewitness
  accounts, and opinions that directly support a
  fact or an assertion.

12
Testimony

• Expert testimony professionals who have been
  trained to evaluate or report on a given topic
• Lay testimony non-experts who can provide
  eye-witness accounts relating personal experiences

13
Testimony

• The speaker must establish credibility.
• Reputation of the source.
• Cite the sources name and title

14
Facts and Statistics

• Facts documented occurrences that include
  events, dates, times, people, and places
• Statistics summarized numerical data that
  demonstrate size, trends, or relationships

15
Statistics

• Descriptive statistics represent only the people
  or places they reference.
• Inferential statistics are data collected from a
  sample or representative group and generalized to
  a larger population.

16
Facts and Statistics

• While statistics are an excellent type of
  supporting material, remember that they are
  merely reports of data rather than statements of
  truth.