End of Harty

Part 6: And Now a Word (or Two or Three) about Ethics
- Final Important Point: All businesses and technical writing must not only meet the needs of its intended audiences and follow a process approach, but it must also adhere to the strictest ethical and legal standards.
+ Communication Failures Contributing to the Challenger Accident: An Example for Technical Communicators (by Dorothy A. Winsor)
Background note: Hierarchy: NASA => Marshall => MTI
- Why do people not communicate material defects, and how to prevent them?
1) Managers and engineers view the same facts but from a different perspective
2) The general difficulty of either sending or receiving bad news
- Knowledge defined as not simply seeing facts but interpreting them.
- Interpretation varies depending upon point of view.
- Communication redefined as not only sharing information but also sharing interpretations.
- Greater tendency to believe in good news than the bad
- Communication within the company is terrible
- Communication outside the company is nonexistent
- Real Life Example: Challenger Explosion
1) Physical Cause of Accident
1.1) Cause: Failure of a rubber seal (O-ring)
1.2) Reason: Failure to question why O-rings became increasingly defective
2) Early Responses to Bad News: Disbelief and Failure to Send Upward
2.1) Reasons
2.1.1) Ignore the problem and it will go away
2.1.2) Schedules to keep
2.1.3) Refusal to take responsibility
2.1.4) Everything is fine to superiors, but serious problems to plant floor
3) Continued Bad News Rejection Despite Contradictory Evidence
3.1) All the companies did not seem concerned about the crew’s lives on the shuttle; thereby continuing to send defective materials until an accident would prompt it to change.
4) Internal Versus External Communication of Concern from MTI Engineers
4.1) Internal Communication was serious while external communication provided no interpretation
4.2) Example of hierarchal problem: Managers did not agree and therefore did not translate the concerns into a language understood by the executives => End result: engineers’ failed to translate technical documents into language that could be understood by the executives, and the disagreement of the managers did not place importance behind the engineers’ fears.
5) The Split Between Managers and Engineers
5.1) Same problem as above. A failure in the link of hierarchy results in the message getting lost.
5.2) Convinced managers too late (might have also convinced themselves a little too late)
6) Conclusion
6.1) Refusal to take responsibility, refusal to communicate bad news both inside and outside the company, split hierarchy lines, and fear of loss of contracts and positions caused the Challenger disaster.
+ How to Lie with Statistics (by Darrell Huff)
1) Statistics
1.1) Sensationalize
1.2) Inflate
1.3) Confuse
1.4) Oversimplify
2) The Sample with the Built-In Bias
2.1) Moral: You can prove about anything you want to by letting your sample bias itself.
3) The Truncated, or Gee-Whiz, Graph
3.1) Truncated to look nicer
3.2) Pay attention before making assumptions
4) The Souped-Up Graph
4.1) Exaggerated axes makes it look more alarming
5) The Well-Chosen Average
5.1) Mean – average
5.2) Median – middle (half way through)
6) The Insignificant Difference of the Elusive Error
6.1) Need to look at the lowest and highest value
7) The One-Dimensional Picture
7.1) Misleading because of the lacking 3D factor
7.2) Book encourages you to shirk responsibility for doing these types of graphs because “everyone else does it” so you can’t help it
8) The Ever-Impressive Decimal
8.1) The more decimals you have, the more exact you are (hence why we have significant digit rules) and deceives readers more than if you gave one number without a decimal which makes it look like an approximation
9) The Semiattached Figure
9.1) Unrelated instances that could be tied together (coincidence)
10) The Unwarranted Assumption, or Post Hoc Rides Again
10.1) Cause and effect reversed and sometimes intermingled
- A well wrapped statistic misleads, yet it can’t be pinned on you
+ Determining the Ethics of Style (by Dan Jones)
1) William Lutz – doublespeak or misleading language is not done by accident but as a product of clear thinking
2) Joseph Williams – Different connotations and denotations of a word
3) Richard Lanham – Why do we call prose either good or bad, and why do people think bad prose threatens the foundations of civilizations
4) What is Ethics?
4.1) Study of right and wrong conduct (simply defined)
4.2) Has many broad terms
5) Ethics and Technical Prose
5.1) Keep in mind who will be affected and how by the way you write
6) Ethics and the Professions
6.1) The Ten Commandments of Computer Ethics (p 370)
6.2) STC Ethical Guidelines for Technical Communicators (p 372)
6.3) Obligations to: society, employers, clients, coprofessionals, and professional organization (technical writers, computer professionals, and engineers)
+ Legal and Ethical Issues in Editing (by Carolyn D. Rude)
- Legal and ethical issues pertain both to individuals and to organizations
- Protect individuals and groups from harm (breast cancer sequence is copyrighted so you have to apply to study it. How is that protecting people from harm?)
1) Legal Issues in Editing
1.1) Intellectual Property: Copyright, Trademarks, Patents, Trade Secret
1.2) Copyright
1.2.1) Owner has say whether they can be copied or reproduced
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1.2.2) Ownership
1.2.3) Copyright expires after 70 years after the owner’s death or 95 years beyond publication
1.2.4) Copyright can be renewed
1.2.5) Ownership can either be one person, multiple people, or corporation
1.4) Copyright Notice, Registration, and Deposit
1.4.1) Registration in Copyright Office gives maximum legal protection (everything is copyrighted regardless after it exists in fixed form)
1.4.2) Problem with this is with lawyers, the more lawyers win over those who can’t afford it (Microsoft over webdomain name infringement Mikesoft which was unintentional and against linux)
1.5) International Copyright Protection
1.5.1) Not all countries offer copyright protection and some are not as good as others
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1.6) Permissions and “Fair Use”
1.6.1) Written permission for reusing copyrighted material should include the three bullets on p 377
1.6.2) Now have copyright where only 1 computer can have software installed even if you own it
1.6.3) Not everyone reads copyright and license agreements (evidence for Adobe where they said by installing this software you are no longer a person. Not many people paid attention because it’s too long)
1.7) Copyright and Online Publication
1.7.1) Cyberspace law is still developing
1.7.2) Laws act as a deterrent but they mean nothing if someone doesn’t care about the laws
1.8) Trademarks, Patents, and Trade Secrets
1.8.1) Employees owe a “duty of trust” to current and former employers
1.9) Product Safety and Liability
1.9.1) Manufacturers cannot avoid responsibility with disclaimers (result: stupid lawsuits and stupid clauses in the new disclaimers)
1.9.2) Instructions, Safety Labels, and the Duty to Warn
1.9.2.1) Clear and complete instructions
1.9.2.2) Show hazards and attach necessary safety labels
1.9.3) The Editor’s Legal Responsibility
1.9.3.1) Encourages editors to be careful in the legal edit (now need lawyers to interpret it)
2) Libel, Fraud, and Misrepresentation
2.1) Libel is a defamatory statement without basis and open yourself up to lawsuits
2.2) Fraud and misrepresentation deceive the public