Reading #7: Chapter 9

I think that for me, this was the most useful chapter so far from this book. There is still lots of what ifs and a series of questions that you can ask yourself or others in order to find the correct path. They even threw in the word heuristic a few times. But despite this, the chapter seemed to present genuinely useful information for navigating the ethical dilemmas that may and probably will crop up in the technical writer's workplace. Some information that has been beat to death by the other chapters was presented as well, with a few new insights. "Whenever you write you take a position a you establish a value vis a vis existing systems of power." This was thought provoking for me; I had never considered that any writing you do is situated within a greater power structure, and especially so for technical writing for a business. The chapter did a good job of showing just how complicated the business world can be. Based on the info at the beginning, I found myself thinking that surely some of these things the writers were asked to do must be unethical, but by the end was informed that there are always exceptions, in much the same way as the field of technical writing.