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.