By Danielle L. Karr | Guest Columnist
This column features ethics scenarios and issues that may affect technical communicators in the many aspects of their jobs. If you have a possible solution to a scenario, your own case, or feedback in general, please contact column editor Derek G. Ross at derek.ross@auburn.edu.
Jane is a senior technical and professional writer who has recently faced many questions and challenges when crafting a variety of documents for her company. These have included ethical dilemmas and considerations when she is trying to create consistently clear, well-written, and principled materials—whether it is a technical manual, advertisement, blog post, or promotional email. She wants to balance her company’s needs with her consumers’ needs, but finds that she is often at a loss for words when she tries to defend her care-centric decisions to internal stakeholders.
Jane decides to solve this problem by building into her company style guide an ethical model to follow as a moral foundation for all company documents. This will not only give her power and language to defend her decisions, it will also help other writers in her company be on the same page ethically. However, she finds herself having a hard time choosing which ethical model to follow, knowing that whichever style she chooses has the potential to change the outcome of any ethical-choice situation. In this column I will propose to Jane, and all of you, an often overlooked—yet extremely applicable—approach to ethical business writing: ethics of care.
Implementing ethics of care (care ethics) as a style guide foundation supports other important writing standards like clarity, accuracy, interest, etc. Instead of forcing Jane to write in the company’s common utilitarian rhetoric (the ends justify the means), care ethics allows her to focus on the needs of the individuals the copy will affect most—the consumers. I have woven the principles of care ethics into my own company’s style guide, helping writers in my company place the customers’ needs at the heart of any communication’s intentions, and I draw from my own experiences here.
The Origin of Care Ethics
Care ethics is a normative ethical theory developed by feminists in the 1980s to explain the differences men and women often display when it comes to moral dilemmas. According to Carol Gilligan, an early theorist of care ethics, society functions on two types of moral voices: one that is masculine and one that is feminine. The masculine voice views things as logical and focuses on the individual—that moral decisions should be based on justice. The feminine voice protects interpersonal relationships and the need to take care of others. While her methods and approaches have been criticized, and rightly so, Gilligan’s work cultivated the idea of care ethic principles, especially the method I explore here.
This feminine voice is the foundation of care ethics and asserts that concern for those around us allows people to make decisions that will most likely benefit everyone involved; that those most affected by a decision will have their needs and vulnerabilities weighed more heavily. The theory about the masculine and feminine voice is also not always attached to biological gender; care ethics is rather a moral approach to satisfy the emotional and psychological needs for both men and women.
The Ethics of Caring for Readers
Gilligan submits that most people are caring individuals who develop personal relationships with others and, in turn, want to be cared about. Scholar Joan Tronto’s four principles of care ethics (attentiveness, responsibility, competence, and responsiveness), derived from Gilligan’s work, are normally found in proximity-based relationships, so this gives writers the unique challenge of relaying an attitude of care to their readers—people they do not personally know. However, writers can apply these principles by being attentive to readers’ needs, acknowledging the responsibility they have to care for them, being competent in their craft, and then doing due diligence to see if the care receivers’ (readers’) needs are satisfactorily met.
For example, Jane has now crafted her new style guide that is founded in care ethics. If she then writes a product manual that, when read by the audience, does not meet the customers’ needs, she will listen and respond by creating a new manual based on the feedback given. Future customers will then have a better experience with the manual because their need for clarity has been met. This will affect both how they feel about the product (influencing their future purchasing decisions) and how they talk with others about the company. By Jane applying care ethics to her manual, she creates a ripple effect that not only benefits the customer, but also the growth and reputation of the company and its employees.
Applying Care Ethics
The following are some ways I’ve employed the principles of care ethics in my company’s style guide, shifting the company’s perspective from simply caring about our readers to caring for our readers. Note that these suggestions go beyond the fundamentals of most company style guides, but they are important in helping a company develop an overall ethical writing style.
Audience-centered Standards
It is always important to make sure the language in a style guide puts the customer before the company, helping to safeguard that documents are not too technical or too distant to the reader. This enables writers to check and make sure their article, advertisement, or manual is not misleading in any way. I express these editorial standards in my company style guide by including language such as, “Be respectful of our customers’ time. Always be sure to not bombard them with information they do not need to know or questions we don’t need to ask.” to convey the importance of thinking of the readers’ needs first.
I also communicate the importance of keeping the vulnerabilities of our readers in mind through language in our style guide, such as, “Keeping [the language] simple also helps ensure the language is clear and helpful—not misleading or misguiding in any way. If you are having to make the language complex to get around an issue, then the core of the message should be revisited.” This approach allows writers in my company to check their work and make sure they are not burdening their readers with unnecessary information or questions, that the documents they are creating have value for the readers, and that there is no misleading information being relayed to the customer. Incorporating language like this into a company’s style guide communicates to all the writers in the company an attitude of caring for customers that will—ideally—translate into the documents themselves.
Third-person Singular “They”
The third-person singular “they” is a controversy within the editorial world. I’m sure everyone reading this column has their own passionate opinion of whether or not it is acceptable to use singular “they” in professional writing, and style manuals such as Chicago and AP each have their own (contradicting) stance. Possibly the strongest argument for the usage comes from a more modern moral dilemma. When we apply care ethics to our approach to writing, we can see that “he or she” is limiting and excludes the group of people who are either gender neutral or prefer to not have their gender assumed or bucketed into one of only two categories. Some readers may be uninfluenced by gendered language, but others will make entire purchasing decisions based on the inclusiveness of the language they are presented; so, why not just avoid the issue?
In order to solve all these problems and create more inclusive company language, it makes sense to standardize the usage of third-person singular “they” in a company style guide—as I have done for my company. Care ethics can be easily seen in this decision because one of the main points of care ethics is the importance of meeting the care receivers’ (readers’) needs. Because we as writers may know our general audience but do not know every single person who will be interacting with our documents, it is a good practice to write in a way that is inclusive of the largest group possible within our audience. Using gender-neutral language is a great way to express care for all the possible readers of a document.
Data-driven Writing
Another way to implement care ethics in digital copy especially is to standardize data analysis within the company. Standard A/B tests and focus groups allow for different language and approaches to be explored and evaluated—helping fulfill Tronto’s fourth principle, responsiveness, in our writings. Applying a standard in the style guide to survey customers about their experience with digital materials is another way to implement responsiveness and allows writers to obtain insight into how the readers respond to the information they receive. For example, my company style guide includes a section on surveys, especially NPS (Net Promotor Score) surveys, that explains how surveys help us be responsive to our customers and not assume anything about their experience or needs.
Gathering this information helps us tailor our future documents to better meet the needs of the readers. It gives us the opportunity to respond and correct anything in our materials that is not properly taking care of customers. By keeping open channels of communication with our customers through testing digital and print materials, as well as constantly requesting and reviewing feedback, we are able to hear and measure their response to us as care givers. This allows us to refine our decisions and better satisfy our customers.
Bringing It All Together
These three examples of implementing care ethics in a company style guide each help create a more inclusive customer experience. The takeaway in this column is that the most important thing Jane can do to promote ethical materials in her company is to implement an overall brand editorial standard that embodies care ethics principles. With this lens in place, she and other writers can check to make sure their documents are caring rather than technical, helpful rather than complicated, respectful rather than inconsiderate, and truly putting the customers first in all company communications.
References
Carol, G. 1982. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard.
Tronto, J. 2005. An Ethic of Care. Pp. 251–263 in J. C. Tronto, A. E. Cudd, & R. O. Andreasen, eds. Feminist Theory: A Philosophical Anthology. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
DANIELLE KARR is a Senior Copywriter at one of the largest smart home companies in the United States. She graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in communications and a minor in English, interned at one of the largest advertising agencies in New York, and recently received a Master’s in technical communication from Utah State University. She has been previously published in Intercom as well as Distance Learning.
Editorial Note
Many of us spend our days writing and revising a variety of documents. From memos and emails to instructions, many of us also depend on an in-house style guide for consistency across our organizations’ many moving parts. In this month’s column, Danielle Karr suggests a revision strategy for those style guides based on the concept of care ethics. By reworking the fundamental writing guides to our businesses, the hope is that we become more attentive to our clients’ needs.
In our last column, Dan Richards called our attention to problems of agency in visual risk communication. R. Bailey wrote us with valuable feedback that we hope helps you continue to work through the issues Dr. Richards brought to our attention. He wrote:
The question of bifurcating tools between expert versus lay-people is something we, too, have grappled with. However, it is important to keep in mind that just because someone is a Subject Matter Expert, does not necessarily make them an expert in using the interactive tool—especially a publicly accessible website that requires no training before use. Although careful design can go a long way to preventing user error, it is not a panacea. For example, designing for greater ease of use can also lead to greater likelihood of error. A stray mouse-click, an errant parameter (e.g., “11.0” when “1.10” was intended), or an overlooked input setting can dramatically change a visualization, but it may not be evident to the user that a mistake has been made. This raises an interesting question—which is riskier, a subject matter expert who does not know how to operate the tool or a savvy tool user, who lacks subject matter expertise? You could easily argue that the SME can pose greater risk because an expert likely has greater influence and impact.
While I also like the idea of creating scenario-based applications of the tool, this carries risk of its own. Scenarios are typically more complex and error-prone than merely displaying data because they rely upon built-in assumptions. You could easily invoke a false sense of fear (or security) by using hypothetical scenarios, which are fraught with variability and unpredictability. For example, you could lead users to make a conclusion like “the map says my home is safe from a category 3 hurricane,” which is a more dubious conclusion than “the map says my home is safe from an 8-foot water rise.”
These are not offered as reasons to avoid pragmatic approaches to tool use—in fact, we have instituted similar strategies of limiting tool access to SMEs in our work – but to point out that sometimes building in more process and layers of complexity in the name of risk mitigation, can have the adverse effect of introducing new risks, which may exceed the original risk of a more basic tool.
Ultimately, I side with the author that we need to be considering and debating the risk of granting access and agency to our users. For the technical communicator, I advocate that we use our skills and expertise to promote clarity and understanding wherever possible.
For example, what more can be done to:
- clarify the appropriate uses and limitations of the tools?
- configure the user interfaces to clearly indicate the specific settings selected by the user and any warnings that may go with it?
- explain the underlying science and data?
- direct users to find more information pertinent to their concerns (e.g., published research on flood risk, flood insurance, FEMA)?
Thank you for the engaging article.
As always, we welcome your responses, and truly enjoying working with the ideas you bring to our attention. Let us know your answers to the questions we’ve posed, your thoughts on our roles as technical communicators in general, or send us your own ethics cases or column ideas. Please send your responses to derek.ross@auburn.edu. Responses will be printed in an upcoming issue of Intercom as space permits.
—Derek G. Ross
