pocketspeak4e

Citing Sources in Your Speech

Printed Page 85

Acknowledging sources is a critical aspect of delivering a speech or presentation. When you credit speech sources, you:

Demonstrate the quality and range of your research to audience members.
Demonstrate that reliable sources support your position.
Avoid plagiarism and gain credibility as an ethical speaker who acknowledges the work of others.
Enhance your own authority and win more support for your point of view.
Enable listeners to locate your sources and pursue their own research on the topic.

As described in Chapter 4 (pp. 26–28), ethically you are bound to attribute any information drawn from other people’s ideas, opinions, and theories, as well as any facts and statistics gathered by others, to their original sources. Remember, you need not credit sources for ideas that are common knowledge—established information likely to be known by many people and described in multiple places (see pp. 26–27).