A CASE STUDY: MIA

Let’s check in with Mia to see how she is dealing with developing her topic and its significance in a way that is truthful.

Mia was excited by her new speech idea. It involved two timely topics—smartphone applications (apps) and refugees—that she knew would interest students. As she began researching, Mia came across one article about refugees who were using smartphones to access social media sites—especially Facebook—so they could communicate with relatives in other countries. Mia was now tempted to frame her story about smartphones by connecting it to social media. But this article was the only one she could find that had that focus. All others seemed to be about using smartphones for GPS or for doing research on supplies and conditions. Mia wanted to focus on Facebook because most students in her class used it. But if she did, she might be misrepresenting its significance for her topic.

After wrestling with this topic, Mia remembered that a family in her church had recently sponsored a family of refugees. She contacted the family and was able to conduct a brief interview with the daughter, who was her age. This woman confirmed that social media had been instrumental in helping them make contact with their host family at the church. Mia decided she would use this evidence honestly to illustrate how social media was important to refugees. Instead of unethically overclaiming its significance, she merely listed it as one of the factors and considered the family’s story as she prepared her speech.

Look for the and throughout the chapter for adaptive quizzing and online video activities.

A CASE STUDY: JACOB

Let’s look in on Jacob and see how and if he is identifying the work of other people in his speech.

After the satisfaction of picking a topic—student athletes should be paid—Jacob realized that besides being a current college football fan, he didn’t know a lot about it. To make matters worse, his speech instructor required students to submit an early progress report that listed their possible arguments and provided at least five sources for their claims. Jacob decided to begin his research online by typing the search terms “paying college athletes.” This led to more than 290,000 results. Without doing more reading, he simply copied some of the titles, dates, authors, and publishing sources of the first five articles that had come up.

This still left the matter of his arguments. One of the search results was a video from the HBO show Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. Jacob watched the whole twenty-one-minute broadcast. The show brought up two arguments: athletes don’t get an education at their schools because they’re encouraged to take “easy” majors, and athletes may not learn much from their coaches as role models. To make this last point, Oliver’s program featured a dizzying array of coaches yelling and swearing at their athletes. Jacob decided to use both arguments. Without citing his source, he used exact quotations from experts and planned to use some of the video of the coaches as a visual aid for his speech. In so doing, it didn’t occur to him that he was using someone else’s material and passing it off as his own.

Look for the and throughout the chapter for adaptive quizzing and online video activities.