ABSTRACT
This chapter describes a basic unit for technical communicators—both professional communicators and professionals who communicate—and offers some suggestions on how to go about teaching the unit. Most technical communicators and other professionals who communicate technical information work in government, business, and industry. The chapter shows that the literature of business and professional ethics can form a bridge between the broad discussions of general ethical principles and the narrow discussions of plagiarism and the like. This ethics scholarship addresses the needs of technical communicators and other professionals while retaining a sufficiently comprehensive focus on them as workers within an organizational context. Any discussion of ethics and writing should begin with an introduction to the subject as it was explored in the classical rhetorical literature. The relationship between philosophy and rhetoric, to use the terms from the classical literature, is extremely complex and ultimately unresolved.
