The Lost Art of the Great Speech: How to Write It * How to Deliver It

Credit where credit is due

If you use a quotation word-for-word, or substantially word-forword, you must give full credit to the originator. Not to give credit is to be dishonest and to hold yourself up for well-deserved criticism. Of course, you can and should also give credit for a closely paraphrased quotation. For example, if a speaker said something like, ''We have nothing to be afraid of except the consequences of being afraid,'' most audiences would recognize that as a clumsy knockoff of FDR's ''We have nothing to fear but fear itself.'' If for some reason the speaker did not want to use Roosevelt's exact words, it would be appropriate to say, ''As Franklin D. Roosevelt once observed, fear is the only thing we have to fear.''

When you ...