Cezar M. Ornatowski discusses “rhetoric and ethics in technical writing” (172). Ornatowski describes how other professionals explain rhetoric and ethics, comparing the classroom setting to the real world. In his teaching he noticed a large difference between the working students and full-time students.
“I cannot help noticing that the working students make adjustments to the stylistic principles we discuss, adjustments that are often as enlightening as t hey are exasperating: ‘I can’t tell my boss about problems so directly…The honesty...and soundness of such comments contrasts with what I can’t help feeling is the naïveté of the nonworking students, who take at face value – often with a vengeance – the stylistic injunctions to be clear and direct, to state the problem and to make messages explicit.”
There is a fine line between ethical and unethical rhetoric. What may work in school reports and academic sectors would not work within in the world of business. Reports which are more straightforward end up going through review processes and must be heavily edited before ending up at their final destination. There are many ethical codes of behavior to which writers must conform in order to produce successful documents. When writers are careless or ignorant with their writing their documents are unethical. “…one could agree with Sherry Southard that ‘being professional means knowing the proper protocol for the corporate world’ and that is the protocol we should be teaching” (179).
I think this observation by Mr. Ornatowski is essential to learning and understanding the significance of ethical writing. Looking back at previous readings from the class I am reminded of the importance of knowing one’s audience when writing. I believe these two concepts are essential to writing worthwhile documents. Like Ornatowski said, non-working students are much less likely to understand the dynamic between the boss and inferiors within the workplace. Giving the boss a document which says the project he oversaw is does not work will not be well received. However, Ornatowski did mention the fact that “the mechanisms for ‘audience analysis’…offer no tools for discerning or discussing the more subtle, and essentially political, choices, pressures, and agendas that one encounters in real world environments.”
The writer comments on the types of skills and components required for a writer to be successful: “From my research in that firm I concluded that a good organizational writer is one who can negotiate successfully the subtle boundary between, on the one hand, the stylistic and formal demands of clarity, objectivity, neutrality, format, and effective use of visual devices, and, on the other hand, the institutional, social, and situational (read: political) demands placed on the text” (178). An argument must develop within the writer where he discusses his work and all the perspectives from which it could be viewed. Without these necessary skills and processes, the professional writer will end up with a raw, unethical document.
Though Ornatowski’s view is a bit on the skeptical side in terms of being able to effectively teach ethical rhetoric, he makes a solid point on the issue. Businesses spend huge amounts of money on ethical writing and will continue to do so. The demand and pay for good ethical writing is high – it is not only important as a benefit to one’s personal career, but also to the good of the business as a whole. In conclusion Ornatowski says, “The essence of its usefulness lies in the fact that it is capable of giving rational, technical, ‘scientific’ mantle to agendas that are always in some measure political and that it gives the illusion of objectivity to what are always and inevitably interpretations. Realizing this is the first step towards having the capacity to analyze the trade-offs and bargains that one makes” (181).
-Brian
~Gorgias
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