Critical Thinking and Ethics

Critical Thinking and Communication

• Critical thinking involves evaluating information, identifying patterns, and making informed decisions.
• It encompasses analyzing logical relationships, assessing evidence, and distinguishing between fact and opinion.

Key Concepts in Communication

• A message is whatever a speaker communicates to someone else.
• A listener is the person who receives the speaker's message.
• Ethics is the branch of philosophy that deals with issues of right and wrong in human affairs.

Ethical Decisions in Public Speaking

• Sound ethical decisions involve weighing a potential course of action against a set of ethical standards or guidelines.
• Plagiarism can take three forms: global, patchwork, and incremental.
• Global plagiarism involves stealing a speech entirely from a single source.
• Patchwork plagiarism involves stealing ideas or language from two or three sources.
• Incremental plagiarism involves failing to give credit for particular parts of a speech that are borrowed from other people.

Listening Types

• Appreciative listening involves listening for pleasure or enjoyment.
• Empathic listening involves listening to provide emotional support for a speaker.
• Comprehensive listening involves listening to understand the message of a speaker.
• Critical listening involves listening to evaluate a message for purposes of accepting or rejecting it.
• Active listening involves giving undivided attention to a speaker in a genuine effort to understand the speaker's point of view.

Speech Organization and Structure

• The ice breaker speech is a speech early in the term designed to get students in front of the class as soon as possible.
• Chronological order is a method of speech organization in which the main points follow a time pattern.
• Topical order is a method of speech organization in which the main points divide the topic into logical and consistent subtopics.
• The body is the main section of a speech.
• Main points are the major points developed in the body of a speech.

Speech Development

• A topic is the subject of a speech.
• Brainstorming is a method of generating ideas for speech topics by free association of words and ideas.
• General purpose is the broad goal of a speech.
• Specific purpose is a single infinitive phrase that states precisely what a speaker hopes to accomplish in his or her speech.
• Central idea is a one-sentence statement that sums up or encapsulates the major ideas of a speech.
• Residual message is what a speaker wants the audience to remember after it has forgotten everything else in a speech.