Usually, when we think of technical writing documents we think about the process of grabbing information and making it more concise and understandable to our audiences however, something that may not be focused on enough is the ethical repercussions that could be had when such work is done. When it is a technical writer's job to understand information and relay it, they are responsible for ensuring the information they present is both accurate and accessible to the audiences without fabricating or misleading. By purposely or accidentally misrepresenting the information they are relaying they can endanger users and minorities by having them lose access to vital knowledge and information that is available to others, putting them at a disadvantage. Writers have to make sure that the information provided is reliable for their audience, they don't have bias seeping through, and are aware of how readers will interpret the information. They have to be aware of how they present information to make sure that if it is a serious topic, it is given the weight it deserves such as when representing death statistics in technical documents.
The risk and responsibility of properly relaying information as a technical writer and its consequences are the reasons why I found a strong interest in this topic and wanted to explore the topic of ethics in technical writing. The idea that if you are not careful enough with your writing you can seriously affect an individual is shocking to me as originally my experience with technical writing came from proofreading and editing company best practices, however, the more I gave it some thought the more it made sense. If I am writing for technology found in a medical device and I don’t make it understandable to my audiences, lives are at stake. If I am writing about nuanced topics, especially in politics or law, having a certain bias can accidentally push agendas in documents that should have been objective, thus creating more division between parties.
During my research, I wanted to find out more about these instances and what is being done to combat this issue by techniques used by technical writers or guides followed to make sure the documents are made in such a way to be easily interpreted by their target audience without breaching basic human ethics and standards.