Dear [Past Contributor],
2010 is drawing to a close, and Worthy Cause’s 2011 projects are starting to take shape! As you may be aware, our mission at Worthy Cause is to make Pittsburgh a better place. To that end, we are planning two events: The Good Things For Needy People Conference and the Conference to Put People to Work. The Good Things Conference will be a gathering of local benefactors, brainstorming together to seek a prosperous future for Pittsburgh’s needy. Complementing The Good Things Conference, the Conference to Put People to Work will bring together community members to build a bank of available work, and liasons between employers and the un- and under-employed, as an outreach of Worthy Cause's goals. Together these two initiatives can make extraordinary ideas into extraordinary real world results! As you have dedicated yourself, as an educator in the region, we know you’ve seen the great potential of our region, and we hope you will support us.
Neither of the 2011 Conferences will succeed without your financial support. We are asking you to contribute to the cost of hosting and running the events. Donations in the amounts of $50, $100, and $150 or above will be acknowledged with a prominent listing in our programs; all donations are appreciated! We’ve enclosed an envelope for your convenience, or you can donate electronically online at WorthyCause.org.
Your contribution will be invaluable to the collaboration—and we hope knowing you’re a part of our ongoing efforts to inspire Pittsburgh inspires you, as well! For more information on 2011’s events, see our site (www.worthycause.org).
Thank you for your consideration and your ongoing support of Worthy Cause. We hope to hear from you soon.
Sincerely,
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
Academic Writing Sample
Write a narrative that explores your understanding of the following question. What is the relationship between professional writing, rhetoric, and ethics?
“Technical writing,” Steven Katz writes in The Ethics of Expediency: Classical Rhetoric, Technology, and The Holocaust, “…always leads to action, and thus always impacts on human life.” (Peeples, 187) As Katz argues, in agreement with Cezar Ornatowski, the tangible real-life impact of the technical writer’s output circumscribes—or should circumscribe—his or her ethical responsibilities. In practice, as both Katz and Ornatowski show, the practical considerations of those in control of data and its distribution seem, all too often, so all-consuming to the technical writer that the ethical considerations appear entirely disconnected from their process.
Driskill’s account of the communication decisions that led to the failure of the Space Shuttle Challenger (Peeples, 116-117) is mirrored in the statements of Ornatowski’s mechanical engineer, “Stephen.” While accountability for the disastrous result of the Challenger example, as Driskill presents, is diluted, placed squarely on neither the engineers nor the decision makers to whom they reported, but at some diffuse point between their conflicting purposes, Stephen stresses the writer’s role in the final outcome of factual analysis. “Selective emphasis,” Stephen asserts, is not simply the writer’s prerogative or creative inclination, but actually becomes the writer’s responsibility, when writing at the behest of some specific authority. In the case of Stephen’s report on the ELCON, he explains, the data is “sacrosanct,” but the particulars of the data can be “…[withheld], present[ed] in a different fashion…to change how a report is perceived.” (177-178) The Secret Reich Business memo Katz describes as an almost perfect document, and indeed the extermination vans Just so ably argued into efficient modification, represent more manipulated data. In its contained rhetorical vacuum, any data can be well-constructed to perform precisely their intended purpose—satisfaction of internal ethics of the organizations for which they are written.
Manipulation of economic data throughout the Presidential administrations dating from 1960 though the end of the previous president’s is a good example of this same phenomenon. Kevin Phillips’ article Numbers Racket: Why the Economy is Worse than we Know (Harper’s Magazine, May 2008) presciently outlined some of the factors that led to the economic problems overwhelming world markets today. Forty-seven years of “selective emphasis” of economic data by every US Presidential administration from John Kennedy’s through George W. Bush’s was designed to change how every key factor of the US economy was perceived. Representing the political interests of presidents seeking reelection, the reciprocally consolidated power conferred when an administration’s popularity is reflected, mid-term, onto House and Senate members of the same party , and the interests of those legislative members themselves, decades of economists have tailored their data reporting to serve those ends. Phillips details the manipulation of data on employment, inflation, the Consumer Price Index, and the Gross Domestic Product (described as “something of a fudge: federal economists used the Gross National Product until 1991, when rising US international debt costs made the narrower GDP assessment more palatable. In the various short terms of the individual economists’ tenures and those of the administrations they served, these manipulations had their biggest impacts on those doing the manipulation: elections were won and jobs pertaining to the data were considered well-done.
While the incidental ethics outlying the administrations, that is, essentially lying to the public, is certainly questionable, Ornatowski’s dilemma as a teacher points out that it is not that simple. Not only were the defined purposes of the administrations ably served, which was the primary duty of the economists, but the short-term real world implications for the public were arguably also primarily positive. With financial statistics seemingly reflecting a stable and growing economy, interest rates and investor confidence behaved as if the economy were in fact stable—and so they grew the economy. The economy grown from this false sense of security has, of course, proven just as false. In the last year, the good practical realities—casual assumption of near-universal access to home ownership, luxury goods, education and stable retirement—dissolved as the bad realities—numbers wildly distorted by “selective emphasis” having spawned insupportable gambles on…still other wildly distorted numbers—finally broke through their layers of obfuscation. The real-world ethical implications have been revealed as having been negative for the public all along, or have simply been reversed as a result of unforeseen play of complex forces not taken into account originally.
Anger among the voting public has been directed at the current administration, for the simple reason that there is no satisfaction to be had from directing the blame elsewhere, as there is no sufficiently specific target. It is difficult or impossible to trace all of the current economy to any one rhetorician. Individual bank presidents or CEOs or CFOs or Federal Reserve Chairmen may be easy to attach to some concrete decisions in the mass of the mess, but it is impossible to ascertain who, among which Congresses or legislative committees of the last decades, is to blame for the policies those individuals were able to make use of. If ethics is the measure of behavior in a moral sense, how are we now to decide what has been done ethically or unethically to the economy, when we cannot definitively say whose behavior it was?
Write a narrative that demonstrates your understanding of the idea that when writing is looked at as a social practice technology becomes more than a tool and these tools morph into the context in which writing takes place.
As a medium, internet writing has eliminated the absolute necessity for hard copy in many, if not most, readers’ markets; in practical terms, there is no limit to the number of copies possible to be made of a given work, as “copies” has become a moot point. More significantly than availability of what can be written, there is no longer any practical limit on who can write. Just as the printing press eliminated the need for the trained scribe, the progression from that invention through the technological advancements has lead to the current elimination of much training for those who write. Word processing software has become able to assess, and assist with, more and more subtle distinctions in writing, from spelling and punctuation errors to grammar and formatting. As a result, technically correct writing is something more people than ever can turn out.
Simultaneously, the software is evolving to learn the “new correct,” the accepted vernacular in spelling and syntax. Where there has always been an almost comical quality to the suggestions from spell-check and grammar-check, limited by their shallow understanding of complex structure, there has also always been an option in most of those suggestions to “add.” While spoken language has always outpaced lexicography, the lag in reference books has been accepted as the arbiter of conflict. If it’s in the dictionary, it’s correct. If it’s not, it’s not—and you should change what you write, to suit the dictionary. Perhaps the “add” feature has subtly introduced the idea that it is acceptable to tell your reference source that you know more than it does, or perhaps it is the simpler, more obvious, case, that people who write as much as they speak—have replaced speech with writing, in many situations—don’t think they need any other authority to weigh in on their writing.
This empowered attitude means that the quality of the majority of writing has changed, especially as it applies to those situations in which writing replaces speech. A quick phone call has become less efficient than a quick text message; the limitations of phone keypads combined with the desired efficiency to spawn a whole new vocabulary of text speak. Such a limitation exemplifies the new direction of disciplined writing. Instead of being constrained by the grammar of codified dictionaries, today’s writers are constrained by the gaps left by writing. Even a vocabulary updated regularly, absent the tone and inflection too subtle for punctuation, requires care of craft. Writing is a skill demanding frequent practice, and today’s writers have access, and impetus, to more practice than any others before them.
“Technical writing,” Steven Katz writes in The Ethics of Expediency: Classical Rhetoric, Technology, and The Holocaust, “…always leads to action, and thus always impacts on human life.” (Peeples, 187) As Katz argues, in agreement with Cezar Ornatowski, the tangible real-life impact of the technical writer’s output circumscribes—or should circumscribe—his or her ethical responsibilities. In practice, as both Katz and Ornatowski show, the practical considerations of those in control of data and its distribution seem, all too often, so all-consuming to the technical writer that the ethical considerations appear entirely disconnected from their process.
Driskill’s account of the communication decisions that led to the failure of the Space Shuttle Challenger (Peeples, 116-117) is mirrored in the statements of Ornatowski’s mechanical engineer, “Stephen.” While accountability for the disastrous result of the Challenger example, as Driskill presents, is diluted, placed squarely on neither the engineers nor the decision makers to whom they reported, but at some diffuse point between their conflicting purposes, Stephen stresses the writer’s role in the final outcome of factual analysis. “Selective emphasis,” Stephen asserts, is not simply the writer’s prerogative or creative inclination, but actually becomes the writer’s responsibility, when writing at the behest of some specific authority. In the case of Stephen’s report on the ELCON, he explains, the data is “sacrosanct,” but the particulars of the data can be “…[withheld], present[ed] in a different fashion…to change how a report is perceived.” (177-178) The Secret Reich Business memo Katz describes as an almost perfect document, and indeed the extermination vans Just so ably argued into efficient modification, represent more manipulated data. In its contained rhetorical vacuum, any data can be well-constructed to perform precisely their intended purpose—satisfaction of internal ethics of the organizations for which they are written.
Manipulation of economic data throughout the Presidential administrations dating from 1960 though the end of the previous president’s is a good example of this same phenomenon. Kevin Phillips’ article Numbers Racket: Why the Economy is Worse than we Know (Harper’s Magazine, May 2008) presciently outlined some of the factors that led to the economic problems overwhelming world markets today. Forty-seven years of “selective emphasis” of economic data by every US Presidential administration from John Kennedy’s through George W. Bush’s was designed to change how every key factor of the US economy was perceived. Representing the political interests of presidents seeking reelection, the reciprocally consolidated power conferred when an administration’s popularity is reflected, mid-term, onto House and Senate members of the same party , and the interests of those legislative members themselves, decades of economists have tailored their data reporting to serve those ends. Phillips details the manipulation of data on employment, inflation, the Consumer Price Index, and the Gross Domestic Product (described as “something of a fudge: federal economists used the Gross National Product until 1991, when rising US international debt costs made the narrower GDP assessment more palatable. In the various short terms of the individual economists’ tenures and those of the administrations they served, these manipulations had their biggest impacts on those doing the manipulation: elections were won and jobs pertaining to the data were considered well-done.
While the incidental ethics outlying the administrations, that is, essentially lying to the public, is certainly questionable, Ornatowski’s dilemma as a teacher points out that it is not that simple. Not only were the defined purposes of the administrations ably served, which was the primary duty of the economists, but the short-term real world implications for the public were arguably also primarily positive. With financial statistics seemingly reflecting a stable and growing economy, interest rates and investor confidence behaved as if the economy were in fact stable—and so they grew the economy. The economy grown from this false sense of security has, of course, proven just as false. In the last year, the good practical realities—casual assumption of near-universal access to home ownership, luxury goods, education and stable retirement—dissolved as the bad realities—numbers wildly distorted by “selective emphasis” having spawned insupportable gambles on…still other wildly distorted numbers—finally broke through their layers of obfuscation. The real-world ethical implications have been revealed as having been negative for the public all along, or have simply been reversed as a result of unforeseen play of complex forces not taken into account originally.
Anger among the voting public has been directed at the current administration, for the simple reason that there is no satisfaction to be had from directing the blame elsewhere, as there is no sufficiently specific target. It is difficult or impossible to trace all of the current economy to any one rhetorician. Individual bank presidents or CEOs or CFOs or Federal Reserve Chairmen may be easy to attach to some concrete decisions in the mass of the mess, but it is impossible to ascertain who, among which Congresses or legislative committees of the last decades, is to blame for the policies those individuals were able to make use of. If ethics is the measure of behavior in a moral sense, how are we now to decide what has been done ethically or unethically to the economy, when we cannot definitively say whose behavior it was?
Write a narrative that demonstrates your understanding of the idea that when writing is looked at as a social practice technology becomes more than a tool and these tools morph into the context in which writing takes place.
As a medium, internet writing has eliminated the absolute necessity for hard copy in many, if not most, readers’ markets; in practical terms, there is no limit to the number of copies possible to be made of a given work, as “copies” has become a moot point. More significantly than availability of what can be written, there is no longer any practical limit on who can write. Just as the printing press eliminated the need for the trained scribe, the progression from that invention through the technological advancements has lead to the current elimination of much training for those who write. Word processing software has become able to assess, and assist with, more and more subtle distinctions in writing, from spelling and punctuation errors to grammar and formatting. As a result, technically correct writing is something more people than ever can turn out.
Simultaneously, the software is evolving to learn the “new correct,” the accepted vernacular in spelling and syntax. Where there has always been an almost comical quality to the suggestions from spell-check and grammar-check, limited by their shallow understanding of complex structure, there has also always been an option in most of those suggestions to “add.” While spoken language has always outpaced lexicography, the lag in reference books has been accepted as the arbiter of conflict. If it’s in the dictionary, it’s correct. If it’s not, it’s not—and you should change what you write, to suit the dictionary. Perhaps the “add” feature has subtly introduced the idea that it is acceptable to tell your reference source that you know more than it does, or perhaps it is the simpler, more obvious, case, that people who write as much as they speak—have replaced speech with writing, in many situations—don’t think they need any other authority to weigh in on their writing.
This empowered attitude means that the quality of the majority of writing has changed, especially as it applies to those situations in which writing replaces speech. A quick phone call has become less efficient than a quick text message; the limitations of phone keypads combined with the desired efficiency to spawn a whole new vocabulary of text speak. Such a limitation exemplifies the new direction of disciplined writing. Instead of being constrained by the grammar of codified dictionaries, today’s writers are constrained by the gaps left by writing. Even a vocabulary updated regularly, absent the tone and inflection too subtle for punctuation, requires care of craft. Writing is a skill demanding frequent practice, and today’s writers have access, and impetus, to more practice than any others before them.
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Unromantic Reasons that I Support Gay Marriage
Many of the objections to legalizing same sex marriages arise from moral fears and a personal sense of distaste, and arguments to the contrary are often exercises in obfuscation. However, it is worth examining the arguments on their own merits, in order to address the underlying motives.
The slippery slope has been posited as a danger, should people be allowed to marry those of their own sex. After all, there are people who claim to have "fallen in love" with children. People who claim to “love” their pets, in the romantic sense. If the argument in favor gay marriage is that "people do not choose who they fall in love with,” it is clear that love is not the place to draw the line.
The problem with this comparison, of course, is that legal marriage has nothing to do with love. One need not love one’s spouse, and until recently it wasn't something commonly expected. It still isn't, in plenty of cultures. It's a nice bonus when spouses come to love one another eventually, or to get to marry someone you love, but it's beside the point. From the state's point of view, the purpose of marriage is traditionally twofold: it's for the getting of children and it's to ease the burden, on the state, of responsibility for the individual's welfare.
In the United States and most Western countries now, that first consideration is not as compelling. Not only is marriage as prerequisite to parenthood becoming, if it has not already become, a cultural anachronism, but it has never been an enforceable law. The state can tacitly encourage moral and cultural rules that dictate children be born within wedlock, but it has never presumed to codify those rules. Indeed, the law recognizes the marriage contract as a legal agreement, and prohibits compulsory marriage of any kind. Conversely, most people and most cultures don't favor divorce on the basis of infertility, and, legally no one has to have sex with their spouse, let alone conceive children. Non-consummation may remain grounds for divorce, but the Coitus Police aren't coming to make sure consummation has occurred, because there is no Coitus Police. The state does not care who has sex with his or her spouse, or not.
The second reason, to have one consenting adult formally claim responsibility for the interests and welfare of another adult, is all that's left. That's why married people get tax breaks--it's quid pro quo for taking up some of the slack from the state.
A dog, a cat, a child, an inanimate object, can't enter into a legal contract. That's why they can't legally marry. Not because of the Bible, not because of God, not because it's icky. From the state's point of view, the legal point of view, sex is not necessary to marriage, and therefore it is a separate issue. You can't have sex with dogs, cats, or children because they can't consent to sex. That is separate from why you can't marry them. (This is also why the law recognizes Spousal Rape. Sex is not a given within marriage, it is separate from the legal contract.)
Another fear of those opposed to same sex marriage is that the institution might devolve further, into a meaningless arrangement between any random combinations of multiple people. “What if,” they wonder, “a group of five people all decide they’re in love and want to marry? What if you want to marry a family member just to avoid inheritance tax?” Will the concept of marriage change at the whim of every person or group of people who want to take advantage of the institution’s perks?
Some people fear that churches shouldn't have to marry gay couples, and that's why gay marriage shouldn't be legal. But legal marriage doesn't compel any religious group to do anything. Plenty of religions--the Roman Catholic Church, and Orthodox Judaism immediately come to mind-- already refuse to marry certain heterosexual couples who are perfectly capable of marrying legally.
Broken down into the sum of their logical fallacies, the arguments against same sex marriage show no compelling interest for the state. As a culture grounded in equal civil rights, therefore, the United States should adopt laws that allow equal (one legal adult to one legal adult, at a time) access to marriage.
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