- Nov 2016
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techwritingf16.robinwharton.net techwritingf16.robinwharton.net
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Technical communicators and technical communication teachers, regardless of their education and job experience
This demonstrates how the field of technical writing is not as concerned with ethics as perhaps it should be. People continue to offer the same ethical explanations as they become more experienced/educated. This means that their experience and education is not better preparing them to grapple with potential ethical issues.
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“Underlying motive is dishonest—wanting audience to misinterpret information by not reading or readily comprehending it.”• “The purpose is to deceive because you are hoping that the viewer will not understand what he/she is seeing.”• “The intent is to deceive the reader and to lead him/her into ignoring important imformation.”
These explanations tend more towards Kant's categorical imperative as they imply that the ethical infractions in question are not wrong because of their eventual consequences. They are wrong because the actions themselves are implicitly unethical.
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“ It changes the meaning of the results in a way the reader is not likely to discover.”• “This could be construed as an advantage to the reader, having larger type, thus easier to read.”• “This misleads the reader and does not factually represent the situation.”
These explanations tend more towards Mill's utilitarian sense of ethics, as they are concerned only with the final consequences of a possible ethical infraction rather than infraction itself.
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“The reader of the graph has some obligation to check how the data is presented.”• “The reader must be responsible for carefully evaluating the information.”• “ People are responsible for reading warranties and taking care of themselves! ’Let the buyer beware’ is the credo of the business world.”
The internet has massively increased the amount of sources available to the public, however, it has done little to acknowledge the varying level of credibility of these sources. In the years to come as the people become more internet savvy, i think we will be moving towards a culture that puts ethical weight on the reader's responsibility to sift through various sources and come to their own conclusions.
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This finding of “strict” men and “lenient” women could also support Gilligan’s claim that men ordinarily adopt a principle of justice to guide their ethical decisions, whereas women are more likely to exercise or integrate a principle of caring (1982, 1987). Nevertheless, on this survey, men and women offer virtually identical explanations of their answers, emphasizing the positive or negative consequences of a specific design decision.
The disparity between there final ethical judgement and the lack disparity in their reasoning indicates that the methods by which men and women examine the ethical concerns within a situation are the same, because they are, in the abstract, coming to many of the same conclusions. It indicates instead that men have a greater willingness to assert their opinions regarding the situations ethical standing.
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Question 6: “It is the reader’s responsibility to carefully review the material.” Here is the same respondent’s explanation for Question 7: “It is your job to
The medium and type of document being reviewed is all part of the situational context, and the situational context has a huge baring on the concept of ethics.There are some situations in which the author is expected to be more impartial than in others. And so different situations will call for different levels of scrutiny from different individuals.
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The relative frequency of specific types of explanations, however, disguises the rarity with which individuals display a consistent guiding philosophy.
As I alluded to in an early annotation, it seems that peoples sense of ethics is transient and so evolves as the situation demands. That is why there is no moral code that resonates with people universally. This quandary is only made worse when applied to such diversely undertaken skills as rhetoric and technical communication.
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Aristotle’s golden mean (i.e., vice in the extremes, virtue in moderation), Kant’s categorical imperative (i.e., unconditional and universal obligations of conscience), and Mill’s principle of utility (i.e., the greatest good for the greatest number).
None of these moral codes conform infallibly to the the popular notion of lay ethics. Take, for example, the trolley problem. The situation can be edited in such in ways that make each of these individual codes look unreasonable, and so they cannot be very useful when trying to survey a larger conception of ethics across a field of work.
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The pilot testing, however, also revealed that students were tentative in judging the seven situations, preferring “mostly ethical” or “mostly unethical” as their answers, whereas the majority of professional communicators chose either “completely ethical” or “completely unethical” as their answers.
I would think that majoring or minoring in technical writing would have the opposite effect. The more education one has on the topic of technical writing the more one should see that the line between what is ethical and unethical technical communication is not always clear cut. There is some technical communication that can tend persuasive in nature without becoming unethical. On the other hand, there can be some communication that is badly arranged but not intentionally unethical in its message.
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Is This Ethical?
When answering this question, one should keep in mind that ethical standing is tied to the situational and cultural context. There are situations where the manipulating of the presentation of information is expected, and so the audience is more wary. In this situation the act itself is not unethical.
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