Writing Ethically

In the workplace, there are certain code of ethics you have to follow in order to keep the integrity of the workplace. As a writer, this passes on to your writing too.

Your Professional Obligations:

Our professional obligation are several, often intersecting and from time to time competing.

1. To yourself

2. To your discipline and profession

3. To your academic institution

4. To your employer

5. To your colleagues

6. To the public

Ethical Principles:

These are the principles you need to follow in the work environment.

1. Legality: The laws and regulations of the profession are followed.

2. Honesty: Truthful and accurate information.

3. Confidentiality: Sensitive information is disclosed only at the consent of the client or employer or when legally required.

4. Quality: Obligations are to be fulfilled in a timely and responsible manner.

5. Fairness

6. Professionalism

7. Commitment to Professional Excellence and Ethical Behavior

Recognizing Unethical Communication:

Communication is a crucial part of a work environment. To protect your professional reputation, you must recognize the ways in which individuals on the job might violate standard practices of ethical communication. The types of unethical communication include plagiarizing, deliberately using imprecise or ambiguous language, manipulating statistics, using misleading visuals, promoting prejudice, and distributing misinformation.

1. Plagiarism and theft of intellectual property:

Plagiarism is the practice of taking someone else's work or ideas and passing them off as one's own. Intellectual property is a property that arises from the human intellect and is a result of human creation. There are five kinds of intellectual property that need to be secured.

• Copyrightable Material

• Trademark

• Trade Secret

• Invention

• Tangible Research Property

Copyrightable material is unique because you have the right to borrow limited portions for presentation or publication without the explicit permission of the owner. If the borrowing is extensive, however, permission is necessary. On the job, writers will often recycle the words and images from various documents of their company without citing the original source. Such recycling of material is efficient and entirely legal and ethical because the company has ownership of the words and images being recycled. However, if it isn’t your company’s materials being used, the writers must acknowledge the sources of the material. The acknowledgement maybe brief and simple in informal writing and following a standard pattern in formal writing. To use such material of others without citing sources is plagiarism and constitutes a theft of intellectual property and is highly unethical and potentially illegal. There are different ways to acknowledge the sources of the copyrighted material you are using that are deemed ethical and legal. However, you do not need permission for material in the public domain i.e. open source data.

2. Deliberately imprecise or ambiguous language:

Ordinarily, unclear and ambiguous language is a result of the writer’s negligence, but it could also be a sign of an effort to mislead or manipulate the reader by hiding or disguising information. Writers can sway the reader’s opinion just through the choice of words. This can mostly be used from a selling point of view where the writer tries to deceive the consumer through false advertising. Negative assertions can often appear deceptive.

3. Manipulation of numerical information:

A leading way for individuals to be deceived is through the manipulation of statistics. For example, imagine the writer of a newspaper that is biased towards a particular political party tries to sway the voter opinion by saying that majority of those who they surveyed is satisfied by the party instead of 51 percent of the 19 percent who returned the survey is satisfied by the party’s work. This does not reveal that this “majority is only 51 percent of the less than 20 percent of the surveyed. Hence the writer has not exactly lied, but likely deceived the readers of the newspaper.

4. Use of misleading illustrations:

Like words, illustrations have the capacity to misrepresent and mislead. Graphs can be used to deceive the viewers towards the writer’s narrative and hence is unethical. For example: a company of 100 employees has only 2 African Americans. In the recruiting materials it carries to college campuses, the company shows a dozen of its employees doing different jobs, including the two African Americans. This portrayal is misleading because it implies that African Americans constitute almost 17 percent of the employees – a gross distortion of the real situation. The readers would be misled and deceived about the diversity of the company and its employees.

5. Promotion of prejudice:

Writers also communicate unethically by voicing prejudice through their choice of words and illustrations. If you use titles for men but not women, you make women seem less credible and authoritative. As a communicator, make sure you don’t reinforce or inspire prejudice and bigotry.

6. Uncritical use of information:

On the internet especially, you can find all kinds of erroneous information, manipulated images, distorted depictions, and dubious claims. If you use this information without finding its accuracy, assessing the credibility of your sources or verifying it across multiple sources, you could easily be distributing dangerous and damaging misinformation.

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