Harty Part 6: And Now a Word (or Two or Three) about Ethics

-business and technical writers have a very real moral and ethical obligations

Dorothy A. Winsor: Communication Failures Contributing to the Challenger Accident: An Example for Technical Communicators
1) Managers and engineers viewing the same facts from different perspectives
*knowledge is not just seeing facts but rather interpreting them, and that interpretation varies depending upon ones vantage point
2) General difficulty of either sending or receiving bad news, particularly when it must be passed to superiors or outsiders

PHYSICAL CAUSE OF THE ACCIDENT
-failure of a rubber seal in the solid rocket booster

EARLY RESPONSES TO BAD NEWS: DISBELIEF AND FAILURE TO SEND UPWARD
-when O-ring anomalies first began appearing in early 1984, neither engineers nor management at MTI treated them as serious problems in their communications to Marshall, did not send an interpretation UPWARD!

CONTINUED BAD NEWS REJECTION DESPITE CONTRADICTORY EVIDENCE
-optimistic view of o-rings continued despite mounting evidence that the rings were not functioning well

INTERNAL VS. EXTERNAL COMMUNICATION OF CONCERN FROM MTI ENGINEERS
-MTI management may have an inaccurate understanding of the situation and a memo was written to clear this up
-his concern was keep within MTI

THE SPLIT BETWEEN MANAGERS AND ENGINEERS
-engineers and managers were disagreeing,
-engineers had hard time expressing their concern "upward"

CONCLUSION
-no one at MTI or Marshall wanted to believe that a problem existed
-even when MTI engineers came to believe that a problem existed, that had a difficult time convincing their management, with its different perspective on operations, to interpret the facts in the same light
-on the night before launch, MTI personnel were unable to convince MArshall of the situation's gravity, even though they looked at the same facts
-both were reluctant to communicate bad news to those outside the company


Darrel Huff: How to Lie with Statistics
-without writers who use the words with honesty and understanding and readers who know what they mean, the result can only be semantic nonsense

The sample with the built-in-bias-
-you can prove about anything you want to by letting your sample bias itself
The truncated, or gee-whiz graph-
-you can chop off the bottom of many types of graphs to deceive
The souped-up graph-
-change the proportion between the ordinate and the abscissa, exaggerates
The well-chosen average-
-comparing the mean vs. the median
The insignificant difference or the elusive error
-so small to determine the outcome, 98-101 IQ
The one-dimensional picture-
The over-impressive decimal-
The semiattached figure-
The unwarranted assumption, or post hoc rides again-


Dan Jones: Determining the Ethics of Style
WHAT IS ETHICS?
-the study of right and wrong conduct
-the discipline dealing with what is good and bad and with moral duty and obligation
-a guiding philosophy

ETHICS AND TECHNICAL PROSE

ETHICS AND THE PROFESSIONS
- the Ten Commandments of Computer Ethics

Carolyn D. Rude: Legal and Ethical Issues in Editing

LEGAL ISSUES IN EDITING
-Intellectual property: copyright, trademarks, patents, trade secrets
-copyright
ownership
copyright notice, registration, and deposit
international copyright protections
-Permission and "fair use"
-copyright and online publication
-trademarks, patents, and trade secrets
-product safety and liability
-libel, fraud, and misrepresentation