Public Speaking

36 CHAPTER^3 Ethics in a Diverse Society

Today, I will share with you the rule I would like to see changed—and that is athletic

scholarships for Division III schools.

The professor thought, “Wait a minute! I don’t assign a change-a-rule speech, but

my colleague down the hall does.” A quick check with him turned up an identical opening

submitted by a student in another class. Kari’s speech was plagiarized. She admitted that

she had changed a couple of lines, but basically she’d given her friend’s speech. Taylor

failed to cite sources in her speech and on her PowerPoint slides. In a speech about

drug cartels, Aaron made up a statistic—an act of fabrication, a second type of ethical

breach. Plagiarism and fabrication are specific ethical violations, punishable by a failing

grade, being fired from a job, and sometimes public humiliation. (Not every culture

shares these concepts. See Diversity in Practice: Plagiarism and Culture for other

cultural notions about intellectual property.) To avoid ethical problems with plagiarism

or fabrication, it is important to understand what they are.

Avoid Plagiarism

Your degree is your college or university’s official recognition and certification that you

have personally learned the concepts and practical skills associated with your degree.^27

Because student learning is their purpose for existing, colleges and universities crack

down on plagiarism. They reason that when you plagiarize, you don’t personally do

the work; instead, you present other people’s ideas, words, or works as your own, with-

out giving credit to the source. It would be somewhat like sending your roommate

to the weight room to do your weight training; you don’t benefit from the exercise.^28

Furthermore, it’s not fair to your classmates who are doing the work.^29

The Internet makes plagiarism easier than ever because it is so simple to access and

download other people’s material.^30 Consequently, someone who would never consider

ripping a paragraph out of a New York Times column or cutting a sentence out of Sports

Illustrated and gluing it onto an outline finds it easy to cut and paste the same material

from those sources online into a computer document. To many people, electronically

stored material is easier to conceptualize as somehow different in kind from hard copies

of the same content.^31

To avoid plagiarism, you should understand its various forms:^32

•   Deliberate fraud happens when students knowingly and intentionally borrow, buy,

or steal someone else’s speech or outline and present it as their own work. Because

Kari’s speech on changing a rule, mentioned earlier, was deliberately borrowed, she

was subject to her university’s harsh penalties for plagiarism, which included an F on

the assignment and a letter placed in her file in the dean’s office.

•   Cut-and-paste plagiarism is when plagiarists copy entire sentences or paragraphs,

word for word from an article or articles and piece them together into an outline

or speech. They omit quotation marks around the copied words and fail to cite the

sources in the speech or next to the material on the outline, even though they may

supply a list of resources at the end of the outline.

•   Improper paraphrase means changing words or moving phrases around but keeping

the basic organizational structure and ideas of the original intact. Although these

plagiarizers might list all sources in a reference list, they fail to credit the source next

to the paraphrased material itself.

Plagiarism can be intentional or accidental. Accidental plagiarists don’t intend to

cheat, but they fail to properly paraphrase or give credit to their sources. Intentional or

not, the consequences can be serious. For example, Allison created a series of PowerPoint

slides with pictures she’d downloaded from the Internet without crediting the websites

where she found the pictures. However, it never occurred to her that she should cite the

plagiarism presenting the
words, images, or ideas of
others as if they were your
own

Deliberate fraud knowing,
intentional plagiarism

Cut-and-paste plagiarism
copying material word for
word and then patching it
together without quotation
marks or citations

improper paraphrase
changing some words of a
source but keeping the basic
structure and ideas intact
without citing the source

accidental plagiarists
plagiarists who lack
knowledge about the rules

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