Page 125 - Between One and Many The Art and Science of Public Speaking

92 Part 1 Foundations

source is credible before using it in the speech. If you cannot identify who is re-
sponsible for the content, your problem is bigger than not knowing how to cite
the source. At the same time, you don’t want to bore your audiences with long
Internet URLs that they can’t possibly remember. So, for example, rather than
saying, “I got this information on fair usage of copyrighted material from www
.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#101,” you can simply say, “I got this from
the U.S. Copyright Office’s offi cial Web site, copyright.gov, on November 1,
2007.” That is enough information for listeners to check the source themselves.
The full URL should be in your written outline, of course, and you should be
prepared to provide it to anyone who asks.
Citing sources is important for direct quotations as well as for specifi c facts,
statistics, and ideas derived from the work of others. Thus, you might not quote
Martin Luther King Jr. directly, but you would still refer to him as the author
of the idea that people should be judged by their character, not their skin color.
As you recognize the importance of providing the source of your ideas, keep in
mind that your audience doesn’t need a quote or source citation for those facts
and ideas that are common knowledge for most well-educated people. For ex-
ample, you wouldn’t need a source to declare that “Albert Einstein developed
the theory of relativity” or that “The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart once hosted the
Oscars.” The audience also doesn’t want to be bored by repeated citations of
the same source when it is the basis of multiple subpoints in your speech. It
is sufficient to say, “The facts I will be discussing now about global warming
come from former Vice President Al Gore’s 2006 book and fi lm, An Inconvenient
Truth.”
In sum, our best advice is that if you didn’t think of it yourself and it’s not
part of the common knowledge of your audience, then it’s best to cite the source
explicitly and orally for the audience. It not only strengthens your credibility, it’s
also the right thing to do.

The Accidental Rip-Off
Perhaps the most frustrating thing for an instructor who discovers a student’s
plagiarism is when the student simply doesn’t understand what he or she has

done wrong. For example, a student may take significant ideas or even quotes
from sources listed in a bibliography accompanying the speech, without say-
ing so in the speech. The student sees no problem, responding, “I did cite my
sources—they are right there in the bibliography.” For the listener, however, there
is no way to know which ideas came from outside sources and which are the
speaker’s own, as mentioned in the previous section. A common variant of this
is that the speaker attributes ideas to a source but actually uses a word-for-word
quotation without making that clear to the audience. The written version of the
speech outline should include quotation marks to distinguish between para-
phrased ideas and direct quotations. Further, you should use “oral” quotation
marks. Either state that you are quoting someone, or make it clear from your tone
of voice that you are in fact quoting someone else’s words. Use such phrases as “To
quote Martin Luther King Jr. . . .” or “As Martin Luther King Jr. said . . . .”
Try not to let ideas become disassociated from their source. We’ve all had the
experience of remembering an idea or a quote but forgetting where we heard it.
Unfortunately, the tendency in a speech is just to use the words. By taking care-