Considering this week’s deliverable, I wanted to share with you an “emergency LEGO kit” that I designed to easily fit into your pocket. This particular set includes a Gunstar fighter, a Ko-Dan fighter, and two asteroids from the film The Last Starfighter.
For this week’s class:
- Weekly Reading Report Exercise
- Perform Peer Review on last week’s deliverable
- Save readings discussion for next week
- Introduce this week’s deliverable and complete in-class exercises
- Review syllabus about next week’s readings and work
- Next week: user testing reports!
To: Professor Ellis
From: Tiana Beatty
Date: 11.10.22
Subject: Weekly Readings
The takeaway I concluded from this week’s readings is about ethics and professionalism. Ethics are moral principles about one’s behaviors while participating in an activity. When writing, whether it be for the workplace or anonymously, the code of ethics and code of conduct from professionalism apply. It’s these ethical codes and professionalism that progress through the workplace as well as productivity increases amongst the workers and throughout the company. I think ethics should apply through writing because writing is a form of communication and communication is a vital part of the workplace community. It allows for us to be able to communication professionally and efficiently while getting our points across to others that don’t understand or have knowledge about an area or subject.
TO: Professor Jason Ellis
FROM: Khaled Akam
DATE: November 10, 2022
SUBJECT: Technical Manuals
Technical Communicators can learn from tactical research but do not let it justify you changing your ethics. Through social justice a new knowledge has become apparent. Being able to create systems of organization and using it for resistance or attention for a cause. We begin to dive into this demand for knowledge that helps the weak by being attentive and receptive to the audiences. The tenacity of these tactics is a dominating power for which ethics come into play. The effectiveness of these technical communication tactics represents those oppressed. Making sure that these tactics are justified using is what we as technical communicators should care about. What is ethically justified to do? We must consider all factors that correlate with human relations be it intentional or unintentional. To sum it all up everything we communicate for is a case-by-case basis of ethics, one is never the same as another. Make sure to question the credibility of all your information to be ethical.
Being only ethical as a technical communicator is a flaw that we must explore before we begin to put our practice into the profession. A structure of ethics is distributing information with credibility and dignity by using morality. When communicating with anyone at any time we should act with only information that is granted to use by all authorities involved. Respect all private acts unless it is illegal or utterly unethical. Above all be professional and fair in every aspect of the job or in anything you write.
To: Professor Ellis
From: Sandy Fougeres
Date: 11/10/2022
Subject: Weekly Readings
The readings for this week discussed ethics and tactics. In the article by Jared Colton et al., it described what a tactic is in society and how technical communicators create tactical documents. The article explains the meaning of tactics being the ways in which marginalized people can find strategies they can use to have control within dominant institutions. The article continues in describing what a tactical technical document would be like, the examples were when the anonymous would give instruction on how to create a DIY gas mask, practice self defense and doxing during the Ferguson riots. I found this article interesting because it spoke about the relationship between technical communication and social justice. The ways in which technical communicating can be helpful using tactics and its true position/place during this time of social justice.
TO: Prof. Ellis
FROM: Naila Butt
DATE: 10 November 2022
SUBJECT: Ethicality
Dear Professor Ellis,
I hope you are doing well!
The quote from the reading Ethics of Anonymous’ Tactical Technical Communication caught my attention. “One human’s existence exposed to another’s—already permeated with ethicality. Because no individual can escape vulnerability, each human body is “irremediably open” to relations of “caring or wounding” I found this quote to be bittersweet and also relatable. We are inherently social creatures exposed to one another, and vulnerability is inevitable. From what I understand from this statement, the human body can have relations of caring or even wounding qualities. With this quote, I gained a new insight into human relations. I believe that ethics is already embedded into the individual, along with some principles passed down to us from parents or role model figures.
On the other hand, The STC code and the ethical framework presented a code of ethics for a specific writing genre. The example shown in the reading was medical writing, which I found helpful as someone who might consider this field of work in the future. The stated principles are straightforward and similar to a general code of ethics but specific to medical writing.
When viewing the syllabus yesterday, I was surprised that we only have four more classes left for ENG 2700! This semester blew by quickly, but I’m pleased with the knowledge I have gained from this course and eager to apply my newfound skills to other classes in the upcoming semesters. Also excited to see what we have in store for us for the last remaining weeks of this course.
Be well,
Naila