"No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world."
- Robin Williams (John Keating, Dead Poets Society)
Writing is an art, a resource for education, and a form of communication. With its use being so diverse, it can be hard to pinpoint who the audience is for a certain work. Every writer can guess who their audience will be but will never know every person that views their work. Creating work directed towards the invoked audience but appropriate for the audience addressed helps writers avoid unintentional ethical problems.
There are steps that every writer should take when writing or editing to avoid ethical problems. The first step is to check and make sure your work has not plagiarized other’s work. In this new digital world, almost every book, article, and essay are at our fingertips, making unintentional plagiarism more common. With that being said, there are now solutions for this problem, like websites and software that check your work for accidental plagiarism. The second step is to avoid using any unkind or violent words directed towards someone. There are cases in creative works where this is acceptable. The third step is to try to make your work equally balanced with factual information and opinions. If your writing is used as a form of education, this is a crucial step. While it is great to voice opinions and beliefs in some works, it is not the best when educating.
Writers should keep their ethical obligations in mind while staying true to their opinions and style. If every writer focused on the negativity that an audience is capable of, groundbreaking and original work would never be written or published. No text will ever be loved by everyone who reads it, but it should never overstep the boundaries of ethical obligations.
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