In “Writing Involves Making Ethical Choices,” author John Duffy talks about writing as opening a relationship with the readers of a piece. As with any relationship there are ethical choices that must be made and ethical questions to ask ourselves while writing, such as ‘What type of person do I want to be?’ and ‘Is this how I want to treat others?’ The specific questions we ask and the way we write depends on the type of writing we are doing, and would differ when writing a persuasive piece versus a fictional piece.
“What shall I say? To whom do I speak? What obligations follow from my words? What are the consequences?”
-John Duffy, “Writing Involves Making Ethical Choices”
There are questions that we can ask ourselves while writing in order to help direct our writing in the direction we want it to. Duffy provided some insightful questions in his piece, asking “What shall I say? To whom do I speak? What obligations follow from my words? What are the consequences?” After answering these questions for our writing, we must consider three ethical responsibilities that we have as writers:
- Understand what kind of writer we want to be
- Understand what our obligations as writers are to readers
- Understand the effects that our words will have on readers and others in our community
Duffy does not only write to inform writers of their responsibilities; he writes to tell readers what their duties are when reading a piece. According to Duffy, we have three ethical responsibilities readers:
- To not judge an individual writer’s ethics based upon our own ideas of morality and honesty
- To understand that not all writers thinking about the ethical implications as they write
- To not judge an individual text’s ethics based solely on its content
These ethical responsibilities are taken directly from the text, but I feel that they do a great job of explaining what we should be thinking about alongside our rhetorical questions as both writers and readers. Understanding these ethical responsibilities is vital to us as writers and readers because they help us to develop our writing to be clearer and more impactful. Beyond asking the deeper questions of what, to whom, and why are we writing or reading, these questions help spark thoughts that are more personal when we think about why we are reading or writing. Each person has their own set of ethics and morals that they follow, and these personal questions bring these ethics into the spotlight as we read or write.
Failing to ask these questions while we read or write can cause us to miss the mark when it comes to ethics in writing.
By not asking ourselves these questions as we read and write, we are missing a large component of our own or the author’s intentions behind writing in the first place. Duffy writes that “an informational… text that is unclear, inaccurate, or deliberately deceptive suggests a different attitude toward readers: one that is at best careless, at worst contemptuous.” A moral dilemma can occur within our writing if we neglect to ask these questions, or a reader could question our morals and ethics if we do not write with proper intention. Readers may feel misled or misinformed if they struggle to grasp the reasoning behind our writing.
Choosing an appropriate tone and genre to write in helps to show the type of writer we are, or decipher the type of writer the author is. Most importantly is understanding how our words will be perceived by readers and how they will affect them. Good writing evokes a feeling and emotion from the reader, and as writers we want to give readers a certain emotion from our writing. Word choice and structure are two main ways that we can get that emotion to shine through our writing, and this should always be in our minds as we write.
