Like other professionals, technical writers come up against ethical issues regularly and must make decisions about how to move forward with a project in the face of ethical dilemmas. A writer may encounter situations that raise questions:

• What kinds of support material and sources are ethical to use?
• Are open web sources just as valid as academic sources for certain topics?
• Can email communications be used without permission?

What if the writer discovers that a company falsified data about the effectiveness of its product? Should she reveal this in her report or perhaps take a different course of action? How much can a writer adapt to an audience without compromising his personal viewpoints?

Ethics principles can provide a basis for deciding whether a situation is ethical but, in reality, ethical issues are complicated. Imagine working for a large company that employs substantial numbers of people in your town, where relatively few other employment opportunities exist. Imagine that the company disposes its chemical waste in a way that could endanger people’s health. Imagine, further, that the company cannot afford to dispose of this waste more safely and that, if you turn them in, the company will close down, most of the town will be unemployed, and the town’s entire economy will collapse. What do you do? Is the risk of future health problems more serious than the certainty of immediately destroying your town? Which choice is really more ethical?

On a smaller scale, if one way of presenting evidence requires some manipulation of data but seems to be the only way of keeping sales strong enough for your company to survive, what should you do? If you take the unethical route, odds are good that few (or no) people will realize you have done so, and you would not be doing anything illegal. If you take the ethical route, and sales plummet, few people will recognize the ethical issue, but most will clearly understand that you caused the sales decline.

GENERAL PRINCIPLES

In day-to-day life, most people have a sort of sliding scale of what constitutes ethical behavior; they might tell a direct lie on trivial matters if being strictly honest will hurt someone’s feelings. For example, you might tell your best friend his new haircut looks attractive when in fact you believe that it does not. This lie, though minor, preserves your friend’s feelings and does no harm to him or anyone else. Some might consider the context before determining how to act. For example, you might not tell a stranger that he was trailing toilet paper from his left heel, but you would tell a friend. In a more serious situation, people might not risk their own lives to save a stranger’s life, but some might well risk dying to save their own children’s lives.

Ethical behavior, including ethical technical communication, involves not just telling the truth and providing accurate information, but telling the truth and providing information so that a reasonable audience can understand it. It also means that you act to prevent actual harm, with set criteria for what kinds and degrees of harm are more serious than others (for example, someone’s life outweighs financial damage to your company; your company’s success outweighs your own irritation). As a guideline, ask yourself what would happen if your action (or non-action) became public. If you would go to prison, lose your friends, lose your job, or even just feel really embarrassed, the action is probably unethical.

PRESENTATION OF INFORMATION

The way a writer presents information in a document can affect a reader’s understanding of the relative weight or seriousness of that information. For example, hiding some crucial bit of information in the middle of a long paragraph deep in a lengthy document seriously de-emphasizes the information. On the other hand, putting a minor point in a prominent spot (say the first item in a bulleted list in a report’s executive summary) implies that the item is important.

A classic example of unethical technical writing is the memo report NASA engineers wrote about the problem with O ring seals on the space shuttle Challenger. The unethical aspect was that the crucial information about the O rings (O rings provide a seal) was buried in a middle paragraph, while information approving the launch was in prominent beginning and ending spots. Presumably, the engineers were trying to present a full report, including safety components in the Challenger, but the memo’s audience—non-technical managers—mistakenly believed the O ring problem to be inconsequential, even if a leak happened. The position of information in this document did not help them understand that the problem could be fatal. Possibly the engineers were just poor writers; possibly they did not consider their audience; or possibly they did not want to look bad and therefore emphasized all the things that were right with the Challenger. (Incidentally, the O rings had worked fine for several launches.)

Ethical writing requires presenting information so that your target audience will understand the relative importance of information and understand whether a presented technical fact is a good thing or a bad thing. A writer must consider a variety of issues that may arise when researching a topic for the business or technical world. Let’s look at a few.

TYPICAL ISSUES IN TECHNICAL WRITING

EVALUATING CONFLICTING RESEARCH

In a technical report that contains research, a writer might discover conflicting data which does not support the projects’ goal. For example, your small company continues to have problems with employee morale. Research shows bringing in an outside expert, someone who is unfamiliar with the company and the stakeholders, has the potential to impact the greatest change. You discover, however, that to bring in such an expert is cost prohibitive. You struggle with whether to leave this information out of your report, thereby encouraging your employer to pursue an action that is really not feasible.

SUPPRESSING RELEVANT INFORMATION

Imagine you are researching a report for a parents’ group that wants to change the policy in the local school district requiring all students to be vaccinated. You collect a handful of sources that support the group’s goal, but then you discover medical evidence that indicates vaccines do more good than potential harm in society. Since you are employed by this parents’ group, should you leave out the medical evidence, or do you have a responsibility to include all research, even some that might sabotage the groups’ goal.

PRESENTING VISUAL INFORMATION ETHICALLY

Visuals can be useful for communicating data and information efficiently for a reader. They provide data in a concentrated form, often illustrating key facts, statistics or information from the text of the report. When writers present information visually, however, they have to be careful not to misrepresent or misreport the complete picture.

The visual below shows two perspectives of identical information displayed in two different pie charts. Though the data is identical, the pie chart on the left presents the information in a misleading way. What do you notice about how the information is conveyed to the reader in these two charts?

Imagine that these pie charts represented donations received by four candidates for city council. The candidate represented by the green slice labeled “Item C,” might think that she had received more donations than the candidate represented in the blue “Item A” slice. In fact, if we look at the same data in a differently oriented chart, we can see that Item C represents less than half of the donations than those for Item A. Thus, a simple change in perspective can change the impact of an image.

Similarly, take a look at the bar graphs in Figure 2 below. What do you notice about their presentation?

If the bar graph above were to represent sales figures for a company, the representation on the left would look like good news: dramatically increased sales over a five-year period. However, a closer look at the numbers shows that the graph shows only a narrow range of numbers in a limited perspective (9100 to 9800). The bar graph on the right, on the other hand, shows the complete picture by presenting numbers from 0-1200 on the vertical axis, and we see that the sales figures have in fact been relatively stable for the past five years.

Presenting data in graphical form can be especially challenging. Keep in mind the importance of providing appropriate context and perspective as you prepare your graphics.

INCLUDING SUFFICIENT RESEARCH SOURCES

Thorough research requires that a writer integrates information from a variety of reliable sources. These sources should demonstrate that the writer has examined the topic from as many angles as possible. This includes scholarly and professional research, not just from a single database or journal, for instance, but from a variety. Using a variety of sources helps the writer avoid potential bias that can occur from relying on only a few experts. If you were writing a report on the real estate market in the Hudson Valley region of New York, you would not collect data from only one broker’s office. While this office might have access to broader data on the real estate market, as a writer you run the risk of looking biased if you only chose materials from this one source. Collecting information from multiple brokers would demonstrate thorough and unbiased research.

A FEW ADDITIONAL CONCERNS

You might notice that most of these ethics violations could easily happen accidentally. Directly lying is unlikely to be accidental, but even in that case, the writer could persuade himself that the lie achieved some “greater good” and was therefore necessary. Even more common is an ethics violation resulting from individuals who are honestly unaware of their own biased viewpoints and therefore unable to recognize the bias in how they have presented information.

Most ethics violations in technical writing may well be unintentional, but they are still ethics violations. That means a technical writer must consciously identify individual biases and check to see if a bias has influenced any presentation—whether in charts and graphs, or in discussions of the evidence, or in source use (or, of course, in putting the crucial O ring information where the launch decision makers would realize it was important).

For example, scholarly research is theoretically intended to find evidence either that the new researcher’s ideas are valid (and important) or evidence that those ideas are undeveloped, trivial, or simply wrong. In practice, though, most folks are primarily looking for support. “Hey, I have this great new idea that will solve world hunger, cure cancer, and make mascara really waterproof. Now I just need some evidence to prove I am right!”

In fact, if you can easily find 94 high-quality sources that confirm you are correct, you might want to consider whether your idea is worth developing. Often in technical writing, the underlying principle is already well-documented (maybe even common knowledge for your audience) and the point should be to use that underlying principle to propose a specific application.

Using a large section of your report to prove an already established principle implies that you are saying something new about the principle—which is not true. A brief mention (“Research conducted at major research universities over the last ten years (see literature review, Smith and Tang, 2010) establishes that. . . .”) accurately reflects the status of the principle; then you would go on to apply that principle to your specific task or proposal.

DOCUMENTING YOUR SOURCES

Documenting your sources includes showing exactly what you borrowed both where you used it in your text and on Works Cited, Works, or References list at the end of your document (the different terms reflect different documentation systems, not just random preference).

Including an item only in the source list at the end suggests you have used the source in the report, but if you have not cited this source in the text as well, you could be seen as misleading the reader. Either you are saying it is a source when in fact you did not really use anything from it, or you have simply failed to clarify in the text what are your ideas and what comes from other sources.

Documenting source use in such a way as to either mislead your reader about the source or make identifying the source difficult is also unethical—that would include using just a URL or using an article title without identifying the journal where it was printed in the Works Cited/References pages. (You would not necessarily identify the journal name in the report text itself, but it does need to appear in the endpaper documentation). Unethical source use also includes falsifying the nature of the source, such as omitting the page numbers in the Works Cited entry to make a brief note seem to be a full article.

Unethical source use includes suppressing information about how you have used a source, such as not making clear that graphical information in your report was already a graph in your source, as opposed to a graph you created based on information in the source material. Graphics, as well as text, should be properly cited in the document text and on the Works Cited page.

Note that many problems in documenting sources occur because the writer doesn’t fully understand the reasons for outside source use:

▪ you must clearly distinguish between your ideas and borrowed material,
▪ and you must use borrowed material primarily as evidence for your own, directly stated ideas.

If you blend source material together with your ideas (by including as “your ideas” your analysis or application of borrowed materials), you will indeed find that showing exactly what is borrowed versus what is yours is impossible. That is because you cannot ethically blend your ideas together with source material. Any time you find you cannot apply documentation principles, consider whether you are using the source(s) unethically. Students often argue that they cannot separate their ideas from borrowed ideas because they would then have to document the whole paper—if that is true, the paper is most certainly not making “fair use” of the sources.

USING CREATIVE COMMONS MATERIAL

When you conduct online research, some source material you locate may be licensed under Creative Commons. Creative Commons is a non-profit organization that facilitates the sharing of creative works by issuing several types of licenses which allow various levels of sharing of what would otherwise be copyrighted works. The licenses specify the degree and manner of allowed sharing. Some content can be remixed, revised, reworked, or built-upon. Licenses vary from specific, limited-use to free and open use everywhere in the world. But if you use material under a Creative Commons license, including work that you have revised or otherwise built-upon, it is still important to let your readers know that you are using the work of others and to cite the source of the material. More information regarding specific Creative Commons licenses can be accessed on the Creative Commons website. (Full disclosure: this online textbook incorporates material shared under a Creative Commons license. See the “Attributions” at the end of each chapter.)

AVOIDING PLAGIARISM AND USING RELIABLE SOURCES

Unlike personal or academic writing, technical and professional writing can be used to evaluate your job performance and can have implications that a writer may or may not have considered. Whether you are writing for colleagues within your workplace or outside vendors or customers, you will want to build a solid, well-earned favorable reputation for yourself with your writing. Your goal is to maintain and enhance your credibility, and that of your organization, at all times.

Credibility can be established through many means: using appropriate professional language, citing highly respected sources, providing reliable evidence, and using sound logic. Make sure as you start your research that you always question the credibility of the information you find. Are the sources popular or scholarly? Are they peer reviewed by experts in the field? Are the methods and arguments used based on solid reasoning and sound evidence? Is the author identifiable and does s/he have appropriate credentials? Be cautious about using sources that are not reviewed by peers or editor, or in which the information seems misleading, biased, or even false. Be a wise information consumer in your own reading and research in order to build your own reputation as an honest, ethical writer.

Quoting the work of others in your writing is fine, provided that you credit the source fully enough that your readers can find it on their own. If you fail to take careful notes, or the sentence is present in your writing but later fails to get accurate attribution, it can have a negative impact on you and your organization. That is why it is important that when you find an element you would like to incorporate in your document, in the same moment as you copy and paste or make a note of it in your research file, you need to note the source in a complete enough form to find it again.

Giving credit where credit is due will build your own credibility and enhance your document. Moreover, when your writing is authentically yours, your audience will catch your enthusiasm, and you will feel more confident in the material you produce. Just as you have a responsibility in business to be honest in selling your product of service and avoid cheating your customers, so you have a responsibility in business writing to be honest in presenting your ideas, and the ideas of others, and to avoid cheating your readers with plagiarized material.

PROFESSIONAL ETHICS

Many organizations and employers have a corporate code of ethics. If you are a technical writer and you join any professional associations, such as the Society of Technical Communicators, you will need to be aware of their codes of ethics, which often published online (e.g. http://www.stc.org/about-stc/ethical-principles). If you are a technical writer researching and writing a report within a specific professional field, you will also need to be aware of that field’s codes of ethics. For example, let’s say you are writing a report for a group of physical therapists on the latest techniques for rehabilitating knee surgery patients. You should be aware of the code of ethics for physical therapists so that you work within those principles as you research and write your report.

Look for the codes of ethics in your own discipline and begin to read and understand what will be expected of you as a professional in your field.