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9.4: Eleven Points for Speaking Ethically

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    209746
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    Eleven Points for Speaking Ethically

    In his book Ethics in Human Communication, Johannesen (1996) offers eleven points to consider when creating persuasive messages. His main points reiterate many of the points across this chapter and should be kept in mind as one creates or consumes persuasive messages.

    Do not:

    1. Use false, fabricated, misrepresented, distorted or irrelevant evidence to support arguments or claims
    2. Intentionally use unsupported, misleading, or illogical reasoning
    3. Represent yourself as informed or an “expert” on a subject when you are not
    4. Use irrelevant appeals to divert attention from the issue at hand
    5. Ask your audience to link your idea or proposal to emotion-laden values, motives, or goals to which it is actually not related
    6. Deceive your audience by concealing your real purpose, by concealing self-interest, by concealing the group you represent, or by concealing your position as an advocate of a viewpoint
    7. Distort, hide, or misrepresent the number, scope, intensity, or undesirable features of consequences or effects
    8. Use “emotional appeals” that lack a supporting basis of evidence or reasoning.
    9. Oversimplify complex, gradation-laden situations into simplistic, two-valued, either-or, polar views or choices
    10. Pretend certainty where tentativeness and degrees of probability would be more accurate
    11. Advocate something which you yourself do not believe in