Ethics in Professional Writing

Professional writers are tasked with informing, entertaining, or persuading an audience to make a decision or take an action. They must consider multiple facets to plan and present information deliberately. Such communicators strive to rationalize their purpose for writing, gain public confidence, and maintain an ethical accountability, with each element coexisting to deliver rhetoric effectively.

Writers are, in fact, rhetoricians delivering messages that involve potentially conflicting agendas and interests, with objectivity, clarity, and neutrality serving merely as stylistic devices (172). Successful writers are often plagued with ethical dilemmas and conflicting demands that can affect their ideas visibility and authority, leading to diminished credibility and perceptions of irresponsibility from their targeted market and organizational standpoint.  

Taking into account that rhetoric is founded on elocution, presentation, logic, truths, and creativity, how does a writer commit to and ethically bridge together the subject matter, company, and audience in support of a common objective?  Information serves corporations and public interests. Expediency and objectivity play important roles in balancing those interests and can work to conceal processes (185-186). Professional writers determine deliberate disclosure of information to facilitate logos but utilize pathos and ethos to provide the impetus to act (187).

It is ethics that define the behaviors of the writer, company, and ultimately an entire culture or audience. Finding the most suitable means of communicating an intended message it based on thought and reason rationalized by ethical actions. The character of a corporation, in addition to its overall objectives, is demonstrated throughout every writing stage initiated by professional communicators.  Standards and legal obligations also promote ethical interactions with audiences in terms of advice, intervention, and protection, and also involve interweaving opposing principles (209). This instance further implicates the writer’s need for careful deliberation. Judgments must be made by the communicator on behalf of the audience within legal constraints to appropriately and creatively divulge pertinent information as to limit lawful liabilities.

In retrospect, conventions for print and electronic publications differ in the sense that each has its own set of standards for which ethics are based upon. Social norms and ethical behaviors may clash. Therefore, writers focus on what is allowed within the respective writing environment when attempting to remain ethically compliant while simultaneously adhering to message delivery techniques in the form of rhetoric. 

Does a relationship emerge between professional writing, rhetoric, and ethics? The principles of effective communication can derive from the general characteristics (structural, professional, cultural, and personal, and needs of the appropriate social collectives and of the people who work in them (173). There is truly a hierarchy in which professional writers should consider before composing documents; however, all components bridge together to equal one whole eventually. Neither can effectively exist without the other.