Reference no: EM133238465

Question: For this assignment, you are a technical writer working for a government agency. Your job is to prepare instructional materials about fighting fires in industrial settings. You understand how technical inaccuracies in these materials can lead to serious injury or death of firefighters or civilians. Recently, your job was to update and expand older more unreliable material published by your employer more than 30 years ago. Now, you want to incorporate recently published material into the older material, but much of the new material is hard for you to understand. The language and information are highly technical and outside your training and experience. What's more, some of the material is contradictory, as improvements and modernization in fighting industrial fires changed the practice and methods for firefighting over the previous 30 years.

While you have some familiarity with firefighting, it is only through your work as a technical writer writing about firefighting. You have no special or specific training in firefighting or any related field such as biology, chemistry, or physics. You got the job with the understanding you would have help from firefighting specialists at your work, along with outside paid consultants. You were told these specialists and consultants would review drafts of the materials you wrote to identify and correct any technical inaccuracies. Soon, though, you realized no one did more than skim your drafts. Moreover, when you called attention to specific problems or areas requiring clarification, you received hasty and evasive replies.

You've come to realize whatever you produce will be printed and distributed to municipal fire departments, safety departments of industrial corporations, and other relevant groups. Mistakes and all. You know there is an ethical problem in this situation. You want to cover your proverbial ass should someone get hurt or worse as a result of using your materials, so you draft a memo to your supervisor, Amber Chiang, who is the Director of All Things Important at The Office of Writing Important Documents. In your memo, you want to both consider and address the following informational elements you learned about in Chapter 2, using specifics of the problem, referencing technical writing basics, and mentioning possible solutions:

Ethical obligations to your employer, the public, and the environment.
Liability law implications on your work.
Corporate culture ramifications on your ethical behavior.
Principles of ethical communication affecting your work product.
EXPECTATIONS

Present your memo in a standard memo form (see page 387 of your textbook) with, at minimum, (1) a header block, (2) an Introduction with a basic overview of the situation, (3) a Discussion with at least four complete paragraphs covering each element and using headers as appropriate, and (4) a Conclusion with 2-3 succinct sentences reviewing the overall memo.

Craft your information as a complete discussion addressing the four elements required in the assignment. Your boss is kind of oblivious, so be detailed and specific.

Be cognizant of prose, punctuation, grammar, style, etc. Maintain correct and professional prose.