3: Chapter Ethics and Professional Communication
Ethics: the general study of the principle of right and wrong. Dilemmas: a situation that demands that you make a choice among equally undesirable alternatives. Professional Communication Ethics Take responsibility for your own communication. Treat others communication with tolerance and respect. (A single incident of ethical failure does not make a person inherently unethical, and learning how to recover from ethical blunders is as important as our attempts to prevent them.) Speak with commitment; will yourself to consciously engage in communication behaviors that are right, not just easy or expedient. Academic Integrity UT defines scholastic dishonesty as any act designed to give unfair advantage to the student. (A more detailed definition is shown in Figure 3.3.) Although most people think cheating is wrong and that rules to prevent it are justified, they rationalize their own dishonesty in these ways: Denying an injury or victim (no harm, no foul) Appealing to higher loyalties (cheating for a good purpose) Denying personal responsibility (circumstances required it) Condemning the condemner (authority figures forced cheating to happen)Scholastic Dishonesty Scholastic dishonesty risks academic and professional consequences. Cheating: trying to get a better grade by trickery or deceit. Plagiarism: any submission of anothers work as your own. To avoid unintentional plagiarism: When you want to borrow another persons words, because they are particularly meaningful, beautiful, precise or concise, use direct quotations.
Understand how to properly paraphrase. Even though you put someone elses ideas into your own words, you still must credit the source. Common mistakes of paraphrasing: o Removing the quotation marks but leaving a direct quotation. o Altering the wording of a passage, but retaining its original structure. o Failing to cite the source. How you know what needs to be cited? o Things that are common knowledge, such as the fact that the universe is made up of billions of galaxies, may be used without attribution.
o Less well-known facts, including specific statistics, conceptual models, ideas and personal
opinions are called proprietary knowledge. This information is owned or created through someone elses labor, so you must attribute this type of knowledge to a source.
o Between these two types of knowledge lies what we call accumulated knowledge. This is
information that you and others have acquired over time through learning and research. How do you know what is accumulated and what you are borrowing (or stealing)? When in doubt, credit to your source. Being an ethical audience member Show up, even if it is not your speaking day. Pay attention: you are responsible for constructive feedback.
Do not walk out in the middle of a presentation. Give appropriate verbal and nonverbal Youre feedback.
Activity putting together some training materials for a workshop on how to make professional presentations, and plan to use our textbook, Professional Communication Skills, edited by Anna M. Young and John A. Daly, as one of your sources. In each of the examples below, does the information from our book appear to be common knowledge, accumulated knowledge or propriety knowledge? How would you handle each example in a way that would avoid plagiarism if you were to use the information in your training materials? 1. When youre poorly prepared for a presentation, meeting, or interview, you know it (Chapter 2, written by John A. Daly). ________________________________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________________________________ 2. Women do more nodding and uh-huhs to indicate they are listening than do men. Men are more likely to interrupt for dominance, but women are more apt to interrupt to join the speaker. . . . No one style is necessarily better than another, but in our culture, we value the person speaking that person is perceived to have control. This is a tendency we must fight constantly in order to be better listeners (Chapter 4, with no author listed as the chapter writer). ________________________________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________________________________ 3. Listening to empathize usually means that you are attempting to feel what the speaker is feeling. Usually, empathetic listening occurs in one-on-one listening situations with a good friend (also in Chapter 4). ________________________________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________________________________ 4. In order to help clarify your structure and assist your audiences retention, slow down your thesis and key points. Likewise, when using statistics, you should slow your pace. Attention-getters and stories can be delivered more quickly. Heres a good rule of thumb: If the information is known, pick up the pace; if it is new information, slow things down (Chapter 14, written by J. Kanan Sawyer). ________________________________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________________________________