Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly....

Unit 2 of our course is about Ethics and Responsibility, so what does that have to do with fish and birds? Well, why do fish swim and birds fly? Because they have to? Because they want to? Because they choose to?

It's strange to think of birds as wanting to fly, or choosing to fly – we think of it as just bird nature. But we easily allow that humans choose their behaviors, and assume this is the basis of values, morals and ethics. But it may be better to think of value judgments or moral choices as semi-autonomous - that is, they happen whether we think about it or not, whether we want to or not, even though if we concentrate and pay attention we can affect it somewhat, like breathing.

Values, worth and significance

What are values, then? Do you have them? Do you have "more" that I do? When a politician says she is the "values candidate," what does that mean? I prefer to think of "value" as something we do rather than something we have. When we value something, we consider that it has worth or significance, and that makes it important to us.

How do we decide what we value? It's partly innate - that is, it just comes naturally to us. We are living, breathing creatures with needs to eat, drink, sleep, procreate, and so on, so much of what we value derives rather directly from basic needs. We are also social creatures, with an evolved tendency to live in groups and cooperate, at least within the groups we find familiar. Much of what we value derives from these social tendencies: friendship, play, trust.

We also learn from experience. As we encounter new things, some things we value and some we do not. Some things we value strongly, forming lasting attachment. Some things we value weakly, forming loose bonds easily broken. Sometimes, the things we value conflict with each other.

Morals: A practical guide to resolving values in conflict

When values conflict, we have to have a system for resolving the conflict. Otherwise, we would just be stuck, unable to act. One method of resolving value conflicts might be to favor strong bonds over weak ones. For example, the need for good nutrition is an old, deeply ingrained value. The satisfaction gained from eating junk food is a new, weak bond. Therefore, while you may eat junk food occasionally, when it begins to conflict with proper nutrition, you would resolve the conflict by choosing good nutrition. (Many addictions involve strong chemical and biological impulses - strong enough that they often cannot be stopped. That's why breaking addictions is sometimes harder than just "choosing" to - it requires monitoring, a strong support system and sometimes chemical intervention.)

Another method might be to favor recently-learned values over older ones. Maybe when you were a kid, it was important for you to identify with a particular super hero, say Xena, Warrior Princess. As an adult, though, perhaps your heroes are more real, and if faced with a choice between "what would Zena do" and "what would my friend Terri do" I'd probably go with my friend.

Our values come into conflict all the time, and it is part of growing into wise adults that we learn systems for resolving these conflicts. These systems are our morals. There are some who claim that morals are absolute and handed down from outside, but really, it can be demonstrated fairly clearly that each of us creates a morality system. That's not to say all systems are equal - they are not. But no system is absolutely right and no system is absolutely wrong.

When individuals develop values and morality systems far different from the society in which they live, they may be branded as either criminal or mentally ill. Either or both may be true. It may also be that in a different context, that individual may not be that far from the mainstream.

As an illustration, consider this etching by M.C. Escher, titled "Sky and Water I." Escher created a series of pieces called "tessellations." Tessellations are repeating interlocking patterns. A simple tile floor made of alternating black and white tiles is the simplest form, but Escher pushed the form to more and more complex shapes.

I want to point out that at the top of the illustration, any two adjacent birds are almost identical. That's us. Most of us have lived in nearly the same place at nearly the same time, so our experiences are much the same. It should not be a surprise then that our values systems are very much alike. (Modern political rhetoric likes to amplify the differences, but they are minor compared to differences among people of vastly different circumstances.)

The farther you get away from any individual bird (or fish, if you're working from the bottom) the more different the individuals. You can't say the the bird on the top, or in the center, or whatever, is the right bird and every other bird is wrong - that doesn't make any sense. And it doesn't make any sense to say that one value system is right and one is wrong. They're just different.

Ethics: how a fish should behave when amongst the birds

So if we have difficulty as individuals resolving values in conflict, and the systems we derive for doing so are our moral systems, how do we resolve conflicts between moral systems? It's a big world, after all, and we will inevitably encounter people, groups, cultures and societies who don't share many of our values.

Groups have devised ethics - codes of proper behavior - to deal with values and moral systems in conflict. They essentially say "for the purpose of this context, here's what we're going to expect." Many companies have formal codes of ethics. Many professions do, as well. Many more have informal codes. They inform us how to behave in our exchanges with customers, with fellow employees and with others in the profession.

Sometimes a professional ethic can conflict with a personal value. One of the tricker ones is when a pharmacist refuses to dispense a medication she believes to be immoral (this situation has occurred with certain birth control medications, among others). The pharmacist faces a choice: set aside personal beliefs and dispense the drug as prescribed; change her personal beliefs (never easy); or leave the profession, or at least the employ of the company that requires her to dispense the prescription.

For technical writers, we have already described some core values: accuracy, clarity, directness, simplicity, appropriate detail. And we have seen that sometimes these values can come into conflict. We will also see throughout this Unit 2 that issues such as respecting intellectual property, being forthright about hazardous situations, and striving for accuracy and accountability are ethical considerations.

Focusing question: What would you do if your job required you to do something you personally object to?

Deadwood

Deadwood. What is it? Where does it come from?

Deadwood can be defined as any words in a sentence that do not add meaning to the sentence. (Refer to Page 127 of the textbook for examples and explanation; Page 129 for exercises. Try a couple - how much deadwood did you remove?)

Words that don't add meaning? How can that be? All words have meaning, so they must add something, right? Not necessarily. True, words standing alone have meaning. But in the context of a sentence, they may not add anything. Three ways words don't add meaning are:

1. They are redundant - they say the same thing twice (short in length, for example)
   
2. They are logically obvious (the complaints we have heard about - of course, because you don't know anything about complaints you haven't heard about!)
   
3. They are "extra" words used mostly for stitching parts of sentences together or for rhythm and cadence (it helps me to think or it helps me think - what's the difference?)
   

Why do we write deadwood in the 

first place, then? The answer is deceptively simple: we write the way we speak. Think about it. When you write, there's a little voice in your head (usually your voice, but more about that later) and you write down what the voice says. It's rhythms, cadences, grammatical mistakes, and fumbling around for just the right word for the situation can lead to deadwood.

Speech is a social process, much more than just a method f

or moving information from one individual to another. It's about who is in control, how engaged and sympathetic you are, and sometimes just a way to keep connected to other individuals (think Seinfeld - they talked about nothing for nine seasons!) We humans have been speaking to each other for as much as 100,000 years - maybe longer! And for 99.5% of that time, there was no such thing as writing. Writing as a principal means of communication among a significant portion of a population is absurdly recent (maybe 150 years or less in the US).

We live in an age of text. Despite all the doom and gloom about the downfall of writing and literacy, there has never been a time when more people could read and write, and when more communication occurred in written form.

Writing is a relatively new technology. We know how to use it, but it's not ingrained into our DNA the way speech is. It's no wonder most of us struggle with writing clearly.

We'll spend much of this semester looking at tips and tricks to becoming better writers. Cutting out deadwood is just one of the tricks. It helps make your writing more understandable, more direct, simpler, with just the right amount of detail - all of which helps accuracy. Sound familiar?

A way of seeing the variety of language

You've found from your searches that there are between half a million and a million words in the English language, yet most of us have a working vocabulary of 20,000-30,000, and of those, we use maybe 2,000 on a daily basis.

So this raises two questions: 1) Where do all those words come from? and 2) how on Earth do we manage to communicate with each other?

Here's an image that may help. It's called a "fractal." The small parts are the same shape as the large parts. Another way of saying it is the large parts are made up of smaller copies of themselves. Another way of saying it is it is infinitely recursive, and scale-independent.

Anyway, look at the central light green portion. At the very center is a little snowflake - that's your daily vocabulary. The light green section as a whole is your working vocabulary of 20,000-30,000 words. Beyond that are areas of specialization. Once you get out to the edges, very few people share that vocabulary. To translate something from the red to the blue, you have to trace a line back down to the light green, then back out. No one person knows everything.

It might be easier for red to understand blue than to understand purple, which traces a very different path out to the edges.

Hope this helps.