It's the end of the semester, your brain is fried, and you just can't come up with a creative topic for your persuasive speech. as a last resort, you pick up the daily newspaper and decide on a topic by looking at one of the headlines. according to your textbook, is this advisable?

I believe the answer is: Yes, scanning newspaper headlines may be an effective strategy to find a speech topic

Scanning newspaper headlines could do this because it serves two functions:
1. The words that you scanned may trigger a certain information in your brain which you could use as a speech topic
2. The scanned headlines could be interesting enough to get your attention and you could start to built your speech from that.

Either one of them would help you out.