John Duffy has a clear and concise message: good writing has good ethics. He asks the reader to consider how they are using their powers as writers to convey a message to an audience. He suggests that one should think about being fair and honest in their writing and give other examples of good ethics to practice, such as: accountability and accuracy.
I think the most important ethics for writers is:
- Accuracy
- Accountability
- Fairness
Writers need to give factual evidence to “communicate an idea or persuade an audience”(pg. 31). If they don’t, anybody can write anything and there will be an uninformed public. Writers should be fair to who or what they are writing about. They also need to be accountable if they are not fair or honest. If an author isn’t called out, it allows others to be less reliable.
I think the most important ethics for readers is:
- Humility
- Open-mindedness
- Fairness
Humility is good to practice because it is easy to criticize, but hard to create. It’s good to realize that human error is common and not everyone is perfect. Keeping an open-mind will allow a reader to understand new ideas and opinions. Fairness is pretty much the same for writers; instead, the reader should be fair to who is writing the piece.
I would have to agree with Duffy’s points:
These qualities imply an attitude toward the writer’s readers: in this case, attitudes of respectfulness, open-mindedness, goodwill, perhaps humility. Conversely, an informational or persuasive text that is un clear, inaccurate, or deliberately deceptive suggests a different attitude toward readers: one that is at best carless, at worst contemptuous.
Purposely writing with malicious intent is a recipe for disaster. That being said, many writers break this rule to further agendas and hide information. Writers Annemarie Hamlin, et al, have provided an example of this problem in real life: a report was done on the Challenger Space Shuttle for diagnostics. There was an issue with the O rings, which are used to seal compartments. Rather that being upfront about it, the NASA engineers put that section in the middle of a long paragraph. This caused this issue to go unnoticed. While this wasn’t the sole reason the Shuttle exploded, it’s possible that other issues went unnoticed because of poor writing.
Hamlin, et al also ask this question:
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.
I feel this take to be accurate. People have a long history of allowing unethical things to happen. There are multiple reasons why we have built a culture of silence: passing the blame to others, fear of retaliation, and a lack of protection for whistleblowers. For example, one of the most famous whistleblowers, Jeffery Wigand, lost everything after he exposed Big Tobacco. He was sued for telling trade secrets, divorced by his wife, and was reduced to work as a high school science teacher.
If we want ethical writing, and to a larger extent, ethical people, we need to promote these values and dismiss unethical works. It can become a dangerous habit if not put in check.
