Table of Contents Introduction Introducing STC Ethical Guidelines Legality Honesty Confidentiality Quality Fairness Professionalism Making the STC Ethical Guidelines Your Own Ethics and Industry Practices Consulting in the 3-Ring Circus Resolving Ethical Disputes Quality Conclusion

Introducing STC Ethical Guidelines

“As technical communicators, we observe the following ethical guidelines in our professional activities. Their purpose is to help us maintain ethical practices … ” from the STC Ethical Guidelines

Included in your welcome packet to the Society for Technical Communication was a brief statement of the STC Ethical Guidelines. How many of us, on first joining, sat down and read those guidelines and really tried to understand their meaning? Not many, I'd wager.

This portion of this chapter discusses each section of the STC Guidelines. The purpose of this discussion is to reiterate the relevance of each section to a consultant or independent contractor.

The STC Ethical Guidelines are composed of the following sections:

  1. Legality
  2. Honesty
  3. Confidentiality
  4. Quality
  5. Fairness
  6. Professionalism

Go to TopLegality

Lex appetit perfectum — The law aims at perfection.

In a professional practice, sufficient knowledge of and conformance with legal statutes is a important factor in a successful, well-regulated business enterprise. Ignorance of the law, or a willful disregard of the law has been the opportunity for instability that capsized many a business enterprise.

You need to familiarize yourself with the aspects of the law that impact your business. If there are aspects of this body of knowledge that leave you persistently baffled, it will pay you to seek competent financial and legal counsel.

The most common way in which new business owners fall afoul of the law is by not making sufficient provision for taxes they must pay. Many people make the mistake of thinking that because the collection effort made by tax authorities is usually less intense than by other creditors, it is therefore less important. Nothing could be further from the truth. These are payments you can't get out of in most cases even if you die (your heirs get to make restitution). It is their inevitability that permits those collecting for them to be more patient.

Once you have violated the law, there is a great deal of pressure on you to compromise your principles and make more money through dishonesty right now, usually with every intention of making restitution later. This is obviously a worthless business tactic that is as doomed to failure as "just one last bet" of a compulsive gambler.

Go to TopHonesty

“The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught.” — HL Mencken

Honesty is often spoken of as a simple virtue. Honesty is simple, it is direct, and knows no compromise. The reality of a professional practice is that truth is sometimes subordinated to "agreed truths." These agreed truths represent articles of faith between you and your client about which you have consented to agree.

A very typical example of such "truth" would be that your client's product is the best widget of its kind ever made. It does not matter whether that is true or not. What matters is that in your professional dealings with this client and with all your other clients you speak and act as though it was your own personal conviction that this is true. There is nothing dishonest in this.

From the standpoint of law, truth is an illusion. People use the phrase "reasonable doubt" all the time without considering that what the law supports is belief and not truth. Certainly, it is an odd client who sues you for agreeing with them. Again, if you act responsibly, in your client's best interest, and seek legal counsel when in doubt, you will likely avoid professional litigation during your entire career.

Go to TopConfidentiality

“In quietness and in confidence shall be your strength.” — Isaiah:15

Almost without exception, from Roman times to the present day, the bylaws of every professional organization explicitly requires confidentiality between client and professional. The reason for this is very simple: trust. Trust is an essential ingredient to the professional relationship. To be worthy of a confidence, you must be capable of acting in a confidential manner. By acting in a confidential manner, you inspire trust.

The law probably does not recognize the confidential nature of your relationship with your client. If you have questions about the legal specifics of your professional relationships, there is no better guide than your local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, or ACLU.

Go to TopQuality

“A gentleman is someone who knows what is correct in every circumstance without ever having been told what is right.” — AT Wright

By quality work we mean an excellent quality of work. Excellence is a relative term conferred upon your work by your client. It is important to be able to separate criticism of your work from criticism of yourself. Part of the art of consulting is eliciting the correct criticism that enables you to correct what is "wrong" with your work and make of it a product that is judged by your client as "perfect."

Effort is important in producing high quality of work, but it is not in itself sufficient. Sometimes, despite your best efforts, you find that your work will not be held to be high quality by your client. In such an instance, it is incumbent on you to bow out and move on to greener pastures. It is the exclusive province of your clients to judge the quality of your work.

Depending on the nature of the service you offer, you may wish to seek the advice of an attorney to draft an approval and acceptance agreement. Such an agreement limits your legal liability to work for free to "correct" something that has been completed and accepted by your client. Of course, if the error is really your own, then you ought to forgive the client his fallibility and make the correction for free.

Go to TopFairness

“Another thing I learned was that it was quite as easy, and a good deal more pleasant, to lay bricks in a good design as it was to lay them in a bad design.” — HL Mencken

No professional of conscience has any patience with institutionalized injustice, prejudice, or a working environment that operates to the advantage of some at the expense of others. Anyone who closes their eyes to such unfairness will be the worse for it.

Quite apart from the fact that diversity is the law of the land, it is also beneficial to have a range of different experience and outlook. There is a certain kind of human ignorance that seeks to make a matter of difference into a matter of relative quality. The history of human experience, especially within the creative disciplines, has certainly rendered this contention ridiculous.

Go to TopProfessionalism

“I hold every man a debtor to his profession.” — Francis Bacon

The profession of technical writing is an old and glorious one. What were the clerical scribes of the middle ages other than the technical writers of their era? It may be argued, with greater or lesser conviction, that the relative literacy of the professional writer and the laity has not changed much since those times.

Professionalism requires commitment, ethical standards, skills, and experience. However talented a technical writer you are, you will not have achieved seasoned professional acumen until you have been hard at it for several years. There is, in addition, one quality of professionalism that is lost on many people after they gain some experience: a true professional is as ready to learn as to teach.