At a recent contest where I was the chief judge, one of the judges pointed out during the break that one of the speeches was not original. He had read it on the Internet before.
As it turned out, another judge had also read the account in the speech before and had marked the contestant down in view of that. In the end, a decision was made to question the contestant about the originality of his speech.
The contestant frankly admitted that only 50% of his speech was original. As the judges felt that it would not reflect well on the club to send a contestant with a speech that was not original to the area level contest, a vote was cast to decide if the speaker should be disqualified.
Majority won and the decision was passed to disqualify the contestant based on originality of speech.
There are no absolutes in this world. I believe many speeches borrow ideas from others and originality is not something many speakers adhere to. Most times they get away with it because many judges and others close an eye to it. Most speech topics are perennial favourites e.g. Never give up, BGR, gender differences... But how you put your spin to it through the selection of stories and personal anecdotes will make all the difference.
