English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

This week's reading from TCT focused in on the various aspects of ethics that are involved in constructing technical documents, namely white papers. As the author noted, these ethical issues could be broken down into 3 particular categories: personal ethics, social ethics, and conservational ethics.

The reading from chapter five in the TCT this week discussed 3 different types of ethics which are: Personal ethics, social ethics, and conservation ethics. Personal ethics to me means the ethics you were taught by your family or learned through religion, that is what is right and what is wrong. Social ethics to me means that ethics you learned from the outside world, such as from laws, or other caring sources, and conservation ethics to me means ethics learned from the world that are in necessary to protect our ecosystem.

I found it funny how they TCT used Albert Einstein’s work with the nuclear bomb during the war as an example of an ethical dilemma. I always like his quote “The secret to creativity is knowing how to hid your sources,” it is kind of the plagiarists motto. Plagiarism also seems like it is going to be one of our greatest hurdles for this project. Being that this is a white paper, we really aren’t going to be coming up with anything original or our own ideas. Most of what we present will be information, data, and diagrams from other sources.

So far I have been doing research on the usability of Opera and some of its convenient features. Since our audience is an IT department, any feature that will help save time or keep data/information organized is helpful. The main feature that stands out about Opera is the “Speed Dial”, where you can have nine “buttons” as your home page. This allows the user to access frequently used pages very fast. This would be great for an IT person that uses a lot of web based network utilities.

This week’s reading contained a lot of common sense information about being ethical. However, I still feel like there is a lot of gray area with ethics on topics dealing with the environment and examples like Einstein’s letter to Roosevelt. And obviously, everyone is going to have a different opinion on what is ethical and what isn’t.

I believe that the biggest problem in terms of ethics for the white paper will be copyright laws. Since we are using lots of information taken from the internet we must cite our sources properly and make sure to follow the rules dealing with copyright laws. Plagiarism, which is copyright infringement where you use someone else’s text, tends to be a problem commonly involved with online researching and can have very serious consequences since it is in fact enforceable by law.

The white paper project presents many issues of ethics I hadn’t even considered before reading this week’s TCT. Since this is a group project, it raises both social and personal ethical decisions. Like the text says, many of these aren’t in fact ethical dilemmas, but simply the difference between right and wrong, and the right choice has probably already been made without extra consideration.

According to TCT’s chapter five is about ethics. Ethics are the systems of morals that guide our society to act properly in any given situation. I believe ethics are part of a foundation towards people acting properly in a well formed society.