Engineering Ethics: Ethical Writing

Ethical Writing

• Ethical writing involves interaction between people, with the intention to do good and avoid evil.
• Ethics refer to rules and standards for acting with intention to do good.
• Communication technology has made it easier to access others' intellectual property and reach out to people, making ethical classification sometimes hard to determine.

Moral Duty

• Technical writing involves using knowledge in a technical field and communication skills to do good and worthy.
• There is no universal consensus on what is good and worthy.

Design Principles

Grouping

• Group items on a page to highlight related information.
• Use headings to group information.
• Headings signal various levels of information.

Using Borders and Rules

• Borders and rules (straight lines) can carve a page into smaller groups of information.
• Whatever appears within a border should be able to stand alone.
• Rules are often used to highlight a banner or carve a document into sections.

Consistency

• Use consistency to create uniformity in the design of a document or interface.
• Consistency suggests that:
  • Headings should be predictable.
  • Pages should follow the same grid.
  • Lists should use consistent bulleting or numbering schemes.
  • Page numbers should appear in the same place on each page.

Choosing Typefaces

• A document should not use more than two typefaces.
• Serif fonts seem more formal and traditional.
• Sans serif fonts seem more informal and progressive.

Pronoun Case Error

• Use "I" or "we" as the subject of a sentence or phrase.
• Use "me" or "us" anywhere else.

Shifted Tense

• Neighboring sentences should reflect the same tense.

Vague Pronoun

• Avoid unclear pronoun reference.

Quotation Marks

• Use quotation marks for literal usage of others' statements.
• Titles of articles, songs, and documents that are part of a bigger work.
• Single quotation marks are used inside inner quotations.

Dashes and Hyphens

• Em dashes (—) are used to insert comments from the author that are asides to the readers.
• En dashes are used in numbers and dates.
• Hyphens are used to connect prefixes and make compound words.

Parentheses

• Use parentheses for inclusion of additional information or referring the reader to a graphic.
• Use parentheses for listing.

Brackets

• Use brackets for editorial notes or comments.
• Use brackets to replace the pronoun in quoted statements for clarity.

Ellipses

• Use ellipses to indicate omission in quoted statements.
• Use three dots, with spaces between each dot (...).