58 4.3 Speaking Freely and ethically
provided erroneous information to the media and public about a terrorist attack
on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Knowingly offering false or mislead-
ing information to an audience is an ethical violation with potentially serious
consequences.
A seeming exception to the dictum to avoid false information is the use of
hypothetical illustrations—stories about events that never actually occurred but
that might happen. Many speakers rely on such illustrations to clarify or en-
hance their speeches. As long as a speaker makes clear to the audience that the
illustration is indeed hypothetical—for example, prefacing the illustration with
a phrase such as “Imagine that... ”—such use is ethical.
Honesty also requires that speakers give credit for ideas and informa-
tion that are not their own. The Publication Manual of the American Psychological
Association specifies that “an author does not present the work of another as if it
were his or her own work. This can extend to ideas as well as written words.”^21
Presenting the words and ideas of others without crediting them is called pla-
giarism. This ethical violation is both serious enough and widespread enough to
warrant a separate discussion.Don’t Plagiarize
Although some cultures may view unacknowledged borrowing from sources as a
sign of respect and humility and an attempt to be audience-centered, in the United
States and most other Western cultures, using the words, sentence structures,
and/or ideas of another person without crediting the source is a serious breach of
ethics. Yet even people who would never think of stealing money or shoplifting
may feel justified in plagiarizing—stealing ideas. One student commencement
speaker who plagiarized a speech by the writer Barbara Kingsolver explained his
action as resulting from the “expectation to produce something amazing.”^22UndErStAnd whAt ConStitUtES PLAgiAriSm Even if you have never
plagiarized anything as public as a commencement address, perhaps you can
remember copying a grade-school report directly from an online or printed en-
cyclopedia, or maybe you’ve even purchased or “borrowed” a paper to submit
for an assignment in high school or college. These are obvious forms of plagia-
rism. Less obvious forms include patchwriting—lacing a speech with compel-
ling phrases that you find in a source that you do not credit—failing to give
credit to a source or adequate information in a citation, or relying too heavily on
the vocabulary or sentence structure of a source.
Suppose your source says, “Based on historical data, it’s clear that large
areas of the West Coast are overdue for a massive earthquake.” You would be
plagiarizing if you changed only a word or two to say, “Based on historical data,
it’s clear that many parts of the West Coast are overdue for a huge earthquake.”
A better paraphrase would be, “For much of the West Coast, historical trends
show that ‘the big one’ should have already hit.”