Your research plan should include how you’ll document and file your findings. This will help you organize your research and avoid committing plagiarism—misrepresenting others’ works as your own.
Organizing Your Research.Develop a consistent approach to documenting and filing the information you find. People tend to keep their research in several forms, including paper, digital, e-mail, and handwritten notes (Jones, Bruce, Foxley, & Munat, 2006). This approach can make it difficult to find specific pieces of information. To better organize your research, follow these guidelines:
General Folder | MySpeechStuff |
Subfolder | Backgrd_Info (documents with background information) |
Subfolder | Stat_Info (documents with statistical information) |
Subfolder | Quotes_Ex (documents with useful quotes and examples) |
Subfolder | VisAid (graphs and charts) |
You can also keep notes, documents, and online sources organized in note management apps like Evernote (evernote.com).
Avoiding Plagiarism.Documenting your research will also help you avoid plagiarism, a major academic, ethical, and legal error. Plagiarism is misrepresenting others’ works as your own. You commit plagiarism when you use exact words from someone else’s work or summarize a unique idea without crediting the source. You have an ethical and a legal responsibility to credit any work that has been created by others, including written texts and spoken words. When you write a paper, you include source information to let your readers know where you found specific information or ideas. You must also do this for speeches by orally citing your sources during a presentation. Even if you unintentionally use others’ ideas without proper credit, you’re still committing plagiarism. Plagiarizing can have terrible consequences, including receiving a failing grade, being put on academic probation, or—in the professional world—losing a job.
You are more likely to plagiarize when pressed for time and when your source materials are disorganized. To reduce your chances of plagiarizing, use the following strategies (see Figure 13.3):
To be an ethical communicator, you want to clearly credit your sources during your speech. The How to Communicate feature on pages 332–333 presents steps for orally citing your sources. When you are unsure about whether to orally cite the source of an idea, it is better to err on the side of caution and give a citation rather than risk plagiarism. Additionally, when preparing your speech, you can ask your instructor for direction if you’re confused about whether a particular idea in your speech requires an oral citation.