BEING DECENT

So far, we've covered some of the basic principles and elements of public speaking. We started out by pointing out that public speaking is a communication skill. What we're going to discuss in this lesson is a basic element that comes into play in pretty much all types of communication:

Ethics.

(Yeah, we're serious.)

Public speakers need to keep ethics in mind during all parts of the speaking process: during the preparation, delivery, and after the speech when dealing with audience reaction.

Being an ethical public speaker is important for lots of reasons. Unethical speakers can lose their jobs, get blasted on social media, have their reputations tarnished, and negatively affect personal and professional relationships.

But it goes beyond what it does to the speaker. Anytime we humans communicate with each other, the things we say reach well beyond just us—and often well beyond the person or people we mean to communicate with. (Anyone who has gone to middle school and heard and/or passed on rumors about a classmate knows this, right?) If there are inaccurate—or downright false—statements in what we say, then those inaccuracies or falsehoods spread far and wide. Sometimes, they become accepted as truth.

We know that you're a decent person who always tries your best to be ethical. We applaud you on that. We really do. But often, being a decent person who tries your best isn't enough to ensure you're being an ethical public speaker. It takes an awareness of the pitfalls, the ethical gray areas, and the issues that are specific to public speaking.

WATCH WHAT YOU SAY

No matter what a speech is about, from the Very Serious and Important to the Maybe Not So Much So, a speaker is responsible for making sure his words live up to ethical principles.

But, um, exactly what ethical principles?

Well, guess what? The National Communication Association has developed its own handy set of principles surrounding ethical communications that'll answer your question.

Read 'em in full here:

• "Credo for Ethical Communications "

As you read, the first principle in the credo endorses "truthfulness, accuracy, honesty, and reason." Sometimes, this is easy. Say you found a statistic in an academic paper that you want to use in your speech. It would be blatantly dishonest and inaccurate if you decided to change the statistic to better fit what you're trying to say, right?

But there are, of course, gray areas that come into play anytime you're trying to persuade or inform others. (Sometimes even when you're trying to entertain them.) Here are some examples:

• A resident wants to stop his city from building a new prison close to his home. He gives a speech to his city council, citing lots of statistics and information about why it would be better to locate the prison in another town. He leaves out any mention of statistics he came across during his research that indicate the planned location is better. Additionally, he makes no mention of the fact that he lives near the proposed site.

• The CEO of a company is giving a speech to her employees about how the company is doing. Instead of being straightforward about financial problems the company is having, the CEO uses vague language and couches negative information by putting a "positive" spin on it because she doesn't want to upset her employees.

• A sales representative for an organic dog food company holds an "info session" for local pet owners. During the session, the sales rep delivers a speech about the benefits of organic dog food over non-organic. The resources and data he uses are all solid (and he believes in them passionately). However, instead of admitting that he works for the company, he represents himself as a "pet lover and advocate." After the speech, he tries to sell his company's product to members of the audience.

Just from these random examples, it should be fairly clear that there are many situations where a speaker might think they're doing the right thing but are actually making unethical decisions.

In later units, we'll address strategies for making sure that you're being truthful, accurate, honest, and reasonable as you research, craft, and deliver a speech.

WATCH WHAT YOU SAY THAT SOMEONE ELSE ALREADY SAID

If it wasn't enough to know you have to make sure your own words are truthful, accurate, honest, and reasonable, what about when you're using someone else's words? (Or ideas, or statistics, or diagrams, or emojis, or whatever.)

Another side of being an ethical public speaker is making sure you give full and total credit to the ideas, words, and data of others.

Cite = right, y'all.

For any speech you give, you'll probably do research to prepare for it. You'll likely wind up using the words or work of someone else in your speech. Maybe you start your speech with your favorite Oprah quote. Or maybe you refer to research from an academic article you read. How do you avoid become a deliberate or accidental plagiarist?

We're guessing you're already familiar with the term plagiarism. But being familiar with the meaning of the word is different from being able to recognize plagiarism in all its contexts. It's also very different from knowing how to avoid it. That's what we're going to talk about in this section.

First, read the following pages from Purdue University's Online Writing Lab (OWL), all of which come from a section on "Avoiding Plagiarism:"

• "Overview and Contradictions"

• "Is it Plagiarism Yet?"

• "Documenting Sources in the Disciplines: Overview"

You probably noticed as you read those pages that they're skewed toward a discussion of academic plagiarism, but the concepts all absolutely, 100% apply outside of a school setting.

Three Types of Plagiarism

To make it even easier to identify situations in which citations need to be used to avoid plagiarism, let's break down the levels of potential plagiarism into three broad categories:

• Global: When someone uses an entire speech written by someone else and presents it as his own.

• Patchwork: Think of it as being like a quilt. This kind of plagiarism is summed up well by the following quote:

Patchwork plagiarism is plagiarism that occurs when one "patches" together bits and pieces from one or more sources and represents the end result as his or her own. (Source)

• Incremental: Using quotes or data that comes from an outside source in a speech without citing where it came from.
  (Source)

Global plagiarism is the kind that most people would easily recognize. Not many people would "accidentally" forget to mention that the speech they just gave was entirely written by someone else, right? (At least we really, really hope not.) It's also the kind of plagiarism that you can't just "fix" through citations. Nobody's going to stand up in front of a crowd, recite someone else's speech word-for-word, and then say at the end, "Oh, by the way, Jane Smith wrote that."

(Again—we really, really hope no one would do that.)

But patchwork and incremental plagiarism are trickier, because often it means having to make judgment calls about whether information is common knowledge (as you read about in the OWL pages) or locating the original source of a statistic or quote that gets thrown around all over the internet.

It's easiest to illustrate how to avoid patchwork and incremental plagiarism through an example, so we'll give you one right now:

• We would be guilty of patchwork plagiarism if we failed to acknowledge that the three types of plagiarism defined above came from a chapter in The Public Speaking Project, written by Alyssa G. Milner and Rachel A. Price. We didn't use the exact same wording to define all three types, however. To make sure we gave credit to the authors, we included a link to the source.

• We did directly quote one sentence from Milner and Price's chapter in the definition of patchwork plagiarism. Because we actually reproduced the sentence word for word, we provided a direct citation in parentheses right after the quote. (We also made sure to state that it was a quote.)

These two types of citations are pretty common, and would look similar whether they were part of a web page, a printed document, or even a slide in a digital presentation.

To sum up: Being honest and accurate are good. Not plagiarizing is also good. Do both, okay? Please?

(Yeah, we know. You've never read something quite so pithy and elegant, have you? Well, feel free to pass it on—but please, remember to cite us.)