Creating Social Space through Communication

Professional writers utilize various methods to effectively communicate information, instructions, and persuasive information to influence actions or decisions. Their primary objective is to “produce relationships between people and ideas,” while simultaneously enhancing their organizations’ reputation (319). Such relationships can be defined as concrete or abstract and represent social space (320). Writers not only initiate connections through the creation of user-centered documents, however, they tend to form these networks before the final documentation even reach their audiences.

Workplace environments act as catalysts between a successfully written document and its targeted audience. Traditional work settings employ a division of labor model project managers and personnel specializing in certain aspects of a project. Mangers are charged with planning, organizing, commanding, and controlling actions – bureaucratic management. Whereas each employee has particularly individualized responsibilities related to project outcomes (322). Yet, more companies are experimenting with instituting an innovative model that promotes collaboration throughout all phases of each project – integrated teams. Integrated teams are composed of individuals from various specialties who share in a holistically determined effort to complete a task (324). Writers are then able to contribute their expertise, acquire new skills, and partake in team decisions to support documentation development (324-334).

In addition to orchestrating networks, professional writers create social space with readers. Writers participate in research to situate readers in efforts to determine social and visual aspects of texts. Investigating cultural constraints that alter readers’ reactions permits information to become more usable. When readers cannot make meaning of texts, writers have either constructed ineffective information, chose an inadequate method for presenting ideas, or did not target the audience accordingly – a perspective supported by the current Society for Technical Communication’s Code for Communicators (350).  

Professional writers engage reader interaction by means of text when communication can be well-received. Professional writers, therefore, engage in risk communication as the result of either transferring information to a public that understands and accepts it, or in some formulations, persuading the public to accept a given risk (366). Identifying constraints is an approach of risk assessment to define and negotiate communication, which becomes a web, a network, an interactive process of exchanging information, opinions, and values among all involved parties (368).  To achieve effective social space with readers must not separate risk assessment from risk communication. It is essential to view readers as participants in the writing process.

Although there are numerous techniques professional writers can employ to construct social space in various facets and environments, their foremost consideration should be to develop user-centered documents while simultaneously adhering to organizational agenda. This balance correlates with their ethical perspective and responsibility to all stakeholders – management, integrated teams, and readers. By instituting a form of collaboration across the board, technical writers are better equipped to produce usable texts enhancing communication to influence readers’ decisions and actions.

Technological Advancements in Writing

Prior to the invention of the alphabet, writing systems posed as complex means of communication in which decoders, or readers, found it difficult to interpret information and meanings (221). Conventions defining the formation symbols and transmission of ideas through technological resources, namely publishing technologies, represent a social force impacting the way texts are understood and used by audiences. It is the responsibility of professional writers to remain aware of such conventions, ethical accountability, and socially situated construct and deliver messages by means that can be accepted by their readers.

Texts must first be recognized as not only a writing system, but as a technological practice to connect with readers and engage their comprehension of what is being presented. During the 9^th century in cultures dominated by prealphabetic scripts, reading was restricted to specialists, lacked a means of achieving social action, and was difficult to interpret due to an abstract writing system. Symbols and words served as recognizable discourse in consideration of those looking to acquire and preserve power (222). Then a shift in communication emerged as technologies further developed, thus leading writers to switch from being gatekeepers to publishers of texts.

Innovations allowed writers to communicate ideas to “others.” However, texts had to be read orally. The lack of lowercase letters, spaces between words, and punctuation to separate statements, posed as time consuming and physically exhausting to readers. Writers reevaluated how texts were transmitted to audiences and instituted those attributes to permit silent reading, dramatically increasing the amount of text that could be processed (224). Yet, the traditional method for producing text by hand was unable to satisfy the demand for literature. Intellectuals began questioning and providing technological answers in response to those demands. In addition, readers also required a more advanced approach for creating their own documents, crossing the boundaries from decoder to encoder.

Developments including letterpress printing, the typewriter, lithography, and xerography brought writing from merely representing a tool for communicating to a social practice that was technologically founded. Letterpress printing used hand-drawn letterforms models that had to be built, forced against paper, and fed into then pulled off a pressed. Although laborious, this innovation established book-making as commercial rather than an artistic activity (225).  The typewriter acted as an alternative to handwriting for the everyday publisher; it was an artificial machine for impressing or transcribing letters on paper or parchment (226). Lithography took publishing to a level of using chemicals to produce text, and xerography made offset publishing through electrostatic printing (227-232). Each technology was created to address the increased public and commercial demands of texts, and counteracted the limited functionality of one another.

Eventually, social practice invigorated publishing and printing trends and lead to computerized advancements in the field. Structure then became a new market within itself. Screen-based and innovative techniques regarding printed texts changed the way information was communicated and interpreted. Whether embedded or interactive, writers and readers alike had more control over the different situation for which texts was used (234-241). Depended upon the situation, texts can be access for extended reading, such as with printed materials, or for quickly accessible instruction, such as with software tutorials via screen. Either way, readers of all texts must navigate to diffuse collections of information (242).

Due to advance technologies in communication, ideas are more easily available to individuals. Copyright laws were originally established to institute an ignoble desire for censorship and protect profits by prohibiting unlicensed competition (255). The new electronic environment, commonly utilized by the public, has initiated and redefined intellectual property and copyright laws. Such laws now protect the labor behind idea development rather than the idea itself. Permission must be acquired before reciting another writer’s work in most situations. However, lines that define copyright laws are often indistinct, and issues are frequently judged per case, rather than on a one-size-fits-all basis to convict infringements.

Increased public demand of texts, from writing systems to interpretation to presentation – had greatly influenced technological advancements throughout history. Developments represent new and improved construction in response to problems encountered from traditional technologies. Formerly considered a tool, social practice within print and electronic arenas initiated a transformation in writing comparable with circumstances that arise due to informational availability and usage.

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.