These are four situations when the ethics of technical editing need to be addressed. I will discuss the legal and ethical issues involved, speculate how to minimize conflict, and propose options for action.
A. In this situation, the legal issues the company faces are whether they can be held responsible if a person using their program makes an error that is in the instruction manual, but not clearly delineated. The editor wants to mark the warnings with the word "warning" highlighted by a color and in all capital letters, while the boss doesn't want warnings to be highlighted because s/he thought it would make the program seem problematic and deficient. Legally, the company needs to include language that will prevent data loss and other user error. Ethically, the company needs to determine how clear these warnings need to be without making themselves and their product look bad.
My proposition for action would be to determine three different levels of warning based on the direness of the consequences of the error and establishing three different ways to label them. My suggestion was two have a Notice level, a Warning level, and then a Highlighted Warning level.
B. In this situation, cigarette manufacturers are required to print warnings on labels, but sometimes the typography used on the labels can impair readability. The legal aspect of this situation is that the companies are required by law to post the warnings. I am not sure exactly what the law specifies about the labeling, but whatever they are, the cigarette companies need to comply with them. The ethical aspect of this issue comes in when the cigarette company can make decision about particular aspects of the typography. Should they make the warnings as easy to read as possible and be sure that customers can read the labels, or should they merely comply with the law and, if possible, hinder the customer ability or willingness to read the warnings? I believe that many of the questions of the typography used have to do with the designer doing the best they can to meet the requirements of the law while meeting the design requirements of the manufacturers. I think that cigarette companies must meet the requirements of the laws for sure and I think the packaging designers should work with good design principles and use good type. Making something ugly is almost as bad as making something that can harm someone' s health (that's an exaggeration). I don't feel like it's a technical editor's position to make too many decisions about this.
C.In this situation, a technical editor is trying to decide if all the warning about a certain product should be lumped together in the front of the user manual, however, good design principles indicate that usability of the information would increase if it were spread throughout the book in the appropriate places (or even in both places as redundancy can work to decrease user error). The legal and ethical implications are the same for the user manual of the computer program in scenario A. The company needs to "cover" themselves by putting the information in the booklet. But they face the ethical dilemma of how much they repeat the information. The big legal question is, can someone have a case against the company if they are somehow injured by the product and the warning in the user manual was included but not clearly delineated? The ethical question is, how much are we responsible for making the information in this manual easy to use?
Again, according to good design principles, redundancy will improve usability and create consistency and flow in the user manual, so that's what I would do. The designer has a responsibility to be a good designer and anticipate how a user will use the information and thus present it in the best way. The problem comes when a boss doesn't want too many warnings, or the user manual has to be produced on a short budget or the designer faces some other kinds of limitations. Then compromises need to be made.
D. In this last situation a company creating a marketing flier uses shading a scale to make a graph seem steeper than it is. The flyer is not meant to be persuasive. The legal issues are if a potential investor can feel deceived by this information and hold the company responsible for any loss s/he incurred. The ethical issues are if a company must present all it's data in the clearest way possible all the time. A question that needs to be answered is, who is responsible for the interpretation of the data in the graph, the producer or the reader. I believe that both parties are equally to blame when miscommunication occurs. The flyer shouldn't rely entirely on fancy graphs to convey information and readers should read graphs with a critical eye especially when money is involved.
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