by: Emily Meyerding
"Every art and scientific enquiry, and similarly every action and purpose, may be said to aim at some good." -- Aristotle on Ethics
Writing, like any art, is a study in compromise. We all aim at perfection and we all make compromises. What you compromise on is a reflection of your professional ethics. As an independent consultant, you will learn that a high standard of professional ethics is an essential ingredient of doing good work.
This chapter deals with some of the issues and some of the circumstances that define a person's professional ethics. The purpose of this discussion is not to lecture you on personal morals. Rather, the focus of this chapter is to provide you with a framework you can use in your professional life to set and keep to your own standards of ethical excellence.
The discussion of ethical issues in this chapter is split into the following sections:
Text of the STC Ethical Guidelines
As technical communicators, we observe the following ethical guidelines in our professional activities. Their purpose is to help us maintain ethical practices -- from the STC Ethical Guidelines
Included in your welcome packet to the Society for Technical Communication was a brief statement of the STC Ethical Guidelines. How many of us, on first joining, sat down and read those guidelines and really tried to understand their meaning? Not many, I'd wager.
This portion of this chapter discusses each section of the STC Guidelines. The purpose of this discussion is to reiterate the relevance of each section to a consultant or independent contractor.
The STC Ethical Guidelines are composed of the following sections:
STC Ethical Guidelines: Legality
Lex appetit perfectum - The law aims at perfection.
In a professional practice, sufficient knowledge of and conformance with legal statutes is a important factor in a successful, well-regulated business enterprise. Ignorance of the law, or a willful disregard of the law has been the opportunity for instability that capsized many a business enterprise.
You need to familiarize yourself with the aspects of the law that impact your business. If there are aspects of this body of knowledge that leave you persistently baffled, it will pay you to seek competent financial and legal counsel. Is there a community college course in your area on starting and running a sole proprietoriship? Investigate your options carefully and make a considered choice in possession of all the facts.
The most common way in which new business owners fall afoul of the law is by not making sufficient provision for taxes they must pay. Many people make the mistake of thinking that because the collection effort made by tax authorities is usually less intense than by other creditors, it is therefore less important. Nothing could be further from the truth. These are payments you can't get out of in most cases even if you die (your heirs get to make restitution). It is their inevitability that permits those collecting for them to be more patient.
Once you have violated the law, there is a great deal of pressure on you to compromise your principles and make more money through dishonesty right now, usually with every intention of making restitution later. This is obviously a worthless business tactic that is as doomed to failure as "just one last bet" of a compulsive gambler.
STC Ethical Guidelines: Honesty
The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught.-- HL Mencken
Honesty is often spoken of as a simple virtue. Honesty is simple, it is direct, and knows no compromise. The reality of a professional practice is that truth is sometimes subordinated to "agreed truths." These agreed truths represent articles of faith between you and your client about which you have consented to agree.
A very typical example of such "truth" would be that your client's product is the best widget of its kind ever made. It does not matter whether that is true or not. What matters is that in your professional dealings with this client and with all your other clients you speak and act as though it was your own personal conviction that this is true. There is nothing dishonest in this.
From the standpoint of law, truth is an illusion. People use the phrase "reasonable doubt" all the time without considering that what the law supports is belief and not truth. Certainly, it is an odd client who sues you for agreeing with them. Again, if you act responsibly, in your clients' best interest, and seek legal counsel when in doubt, you will likely avoid professional litigation during your entire career.
STC Ethical Guidelines: Confidentiality
In quietness and in confidence shall be your strength. -- Isaiah:15
Almost without exception, from Roman times to the present day, the bylaws of every professional organization explicitly requires confidentiality between client and professional. The reason for this is very simple: trust. Trust is an essential ingredient to the professional relationship. To be worthy of a confidence, you must be capable of acting in a confidential manner. By acting in a confidential manner, you inspire trust.
The law probably does not recognize the confidential nature of your relationship with your client. If you have questions about the legal specifics of your professional relationships, there is no better guide than your local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union ACLU
STC Ethical Guidelines: Quality
A gentleman is someone who knows what is correct in every circumstance without ever having been told what is right. -- AT Wright
By quality work we mean an excellent quality of work. Excellence is a relative term conferred upon your work by your client. It is important to be able to separate criticism of your work from criticism of yourself. Part of the art of consulting is eliciting the correct criticism that enables you to correct what is "wrong" with your work and make of it a product that is judged by your client as "perfect."
Effort is important in producing high quality of work, but it is not in itself sufficient. Sometimes, despite your best efforts, you find that your work will not be held to be high quality by your client. In such an instance, it is incumbent on you to bow out and move on to greener pastures. It is the exclusive province of your clients to judge the quality of your work. Very few old car buffs would argue that Ford made a motor car that was superior to a Peerless. Never heard of Peerless? Let your client be 110% wrong about the quality of your work. This is NOT a personal reflection on you, no matter how personal it feels.
Depending on the nature of the service you offer, you may wish to seek the advice of an attorney to draft an approval and acceptance agreement. Such an agreement limits your legal liability to work for free to "correct" something that has been completed and accepted by your client. Of course, if the error is really your own, then you ought to forgive the client his fallibility and make the correction for free.
STC Ethical Guidelines: Fairness
Another thing I learned was that it was quite as easy, and a good deal more pleasant, to lay bricks in a good design as it was to lay them in a bad design. -- HL Mencken
No professional of conscience has any patience with institutionalized injustice, prejudice, or a working environment that operates to the advantage of some at the expense of others. Anyone who closes their eyes to such unfairness will be the worse for it.
Quite apart from the fact that diversity is the law of the land, it is also beneficial to have a range of different experience and outlook. There is a certain kind of human ignorance that seeks to make a matter of difference into a matter of relative quality. The history of human experience, especially within the creative disciplines, has certainly rendered this contention ridiculous.
STC Ethical Guidelines:Professionalism
I hold every man a debtor to his profession. -- Francis Bacon
The profession of technical writing is an old and glorious one. What were the clerical scribes of the middle ages other than the technical writers of their era? It may be argued, with greater or lesser conviction, that the relative literacy of the professional writer and the laity has not changed much since those times.
Professionalism requires commitment, ethical standards, skills, and experience. However talented a technical writer you are, you will not have achieved seasoned professional acumen until you have been hard at it for several years. There is, in addition, one quality of professionalism that is lost on many people after they gain some experience: a true professional is as ready to learn as to teach.
Text of the STC Ethical Guidelines
And in your pursuit of the devil would you cut down every law? ...And then when the devil turned on you, where would you hide, all the laws being flat? -- character of Sir Thomas Moore in A Man for All Seasons.
No ethics are of any use if they are filed away with your back issues of STC Journals gathering dust. To have meaning, you must gain a personal understanding of what the STC Guidelines mean to you, to your clients, to your family, and to your consulting practice.
In order to behave in a consistently ethical manner, you must come to understand that every act is an expression of your ethics. Many people seem to think that they can make different sections of their lives and make different rules for each section. That does not work well for most folks. The lucky ones get a second chance to knit their broken segments of their lives back together.
The subject of one ethic for one life always reminds me of an anecdote from a popular speaker on the university campuses, Michael Parenti. He relates how he visited an acupuncturist and asked him innocently, "How come when my head hurts you put a needle in my foot?" His acupuncturist looks with pity on this poor Occidental before him and with his best Oriental patience, he says: "Whole body connected, take a look." Well, whole life connected, too, take a look.
I am honest because I understand no other way to be. -- St. Thomas Aquinas
Most people are much better at focusing down on the momentary
problem at hand than at stepping back and taking in the whole of their
life, their aspirations, and their plans. People don't normally live in
the long term. It is an acquired skill. Look at any successful
business person, and you will see this skill developed to a much
greater extent than normal. What are the steps to business
success?
This process has a clear parallel in terms of defining your ethics and
achieving high standards of ethical standards:
There are lots of people who are serious about success. Success is important to them. But success is more than making a ton of money. How you become successful has a lot to do with the effect that this success has upon you. The people who get the most happiness from their success are people who understand the importance of being serious about their ethics. Most people treat ethics as though it was something you need to take for granted, not a something that has to be developed and worked for and cherished. For most people, success has a lot of very hard lessons.
Much of the blame for this is that there are so many basically good folks wandering about mouthing someone else's ethics without ever having really examined their own hearts. This is not a prescription for happiness.
Be careful what you ask for... you may get it.
Text of the STC Ethical Guidelines
The wisdom of business would make crooks of us all. -- Louise Stinchfeld
Industry practices are those common means and methods of business encountered
in the course of doing business in, with, and for a particular profession.
There are four general classes of such practices:
A good person loves the sound of true words, the company of friends, the fair profit of able dealing. -- Lao Tzu
Technical writers are, by and large, a good group of people. They are reasonably honest and typically conscientious about keeping off each others' toes. It is rare for the oncoming technical writer to bad-mouth his or her predecessor, even when they were singularly deserving. When two technical writers come together professionally they are usually solicitous, helpful and sympathetic to their comrade's burdens.
This is not to say that every technical writer is a saint, that they do not make mistakes, or quarrel, or tell the occasional white lie. But, as professionals, ours is a helpful and conciliatory undertaking that is more creative and cooperative than controlling or competitive.
The vast majority of ethical dilemmas technical communication folk find
themselves in fall into three categories:
You know that you shouldn't do it, but everyone else around you is doing
it. No one has ever been caught doing it. If you want to do it enough you'll
probably convince yourself that your client actually expects you to do
it. Prime candidate: web surfing on client time.
You did not meet a commitment, but no one seems to notice. If you don't
do anything about it, then it will probably go away. It will only make
trouble if you bring it up. Professionals don't make mistakes, right? Prime
candidate: submitting copy for localization on Friday instead of Monday.
You can see a pattern here. You pause to examine it and come to the inescapable conclusion that this is trouble. It is also not anything really to do with you, and the person at fault is really quite nice, at least he means well. Prime candidate: uncompleted batch of purchase orders forgotten on shelf above copy machine.
It does not require a degree in rocket science to pick a virtuous path through these examples. It is amazing how few people are as sure footed in reality as in conjecture. All that is really required to improve your ethical behavior in these circumstances is a personal commitment to do the right thing. Even when this is personally difficult or embarrassing, you can always take solace in the fact that it is almost certainly easier and more pleasant to do it right than to clean up after doing it wrong.
An ounce of integrity is worth a pound of sinecure.
Society is like a joint stock company organized for the purpose of defrauding the stockholders. -- Ralph Waldo Emmerson
There are some standard industry practices that are just tailor made to make crooks out of us all. Number one on this list: billable hours. There never was a better correlation between "how to cheat" and "how to make more money." It is an awful temptation to anyone, whether he's a corporate attorney or an auto mechanic.
There is no easy answer to the question of how one should insulate oneself from this temptation. How honest is honest, exactly? When does honest inexactness become dishonest chiselling?
The best thing to do is to be exactly consistent in your recording of time spent on a project. You cannot make too careful a record. Acquaint your client with your timekeeping methodology. The time you spend keeping track of your time is billable time, too. Always follow the same rules of timekeeping regardless of the client or the specifics of the project. Is there overtime? Get it authorized the instant you know that it is going to happen. Is the client wanting you to hang about with nothing to do? Get your client to understand this immediately.
There are plenty of professional practices whose careful records are arrived at retroactively to substantiate a bill that is is dispute. Do not ever get yourself in that noose. Keeping detailed and accurate records is a pain at first, but it soon becomes second nature. [LINK TO CHAPTER 8: MANAGING INDEPENDENT WORK.]
Make yourself a plan for the day. Try to estimate how much time you'll spend doing what. Write down the time you'll reserve for lunch, for that phone call to your bother, to picking up your coat from the cleaners, and to meetings (who will be there). After each item has happened, check it off and record the actual times and circumstances. Keep your notes and to do lists in the same place. If this place is a computer Back -- It -- Up. If you make notes somewhere else, transcribe them to this central list. Throw nothing away. Keep a file folder for "disposable" things like post-it notes.
Keep this up and never fall behind. When your records show you have 11 hours on a project, bill that and only that. Never manipulate the record - even if you know it to be wrong. When you start adjusting things, regardless of how pure your motives, you are on a very slippery slope and you won't believe how quickly the ground will fall away from beneath your moral feet.
The ugliness we see in others only becomes intollerable when we discover it within ourselves. -- Frederick Constable
One of the biggest (and most lucrative) areas of legal study involves torts and contracts. Most people have a pretty clear idea of what a contract is, but get rather fuzzy about those torts. Simply put, a tort is a wrong, or an injustice. In legal parlance, a tort is something for which compensation or redress is applied for in a court of law. In contracting terms, a tort is the yawning gulf that opens up between you and your client whenever the two of you do not agree about the things you have contracted together to achieve. [HERE WE CAN LINK TO CHAPTER 11: HOW TO WRITE CONTRACTS.]
The basis of an independent contractor's contract with his or her clients is the proposal. The proposal starts the process of expectation and delivery. Almost everyone will agree that first impressions are very important in establishing a professional relationship. That being so, it is amazing how little care many people take with their proposals.
From an ethical perspective, the proposal is of overriding importance
because it defines you to your client. The proposal makes a professional
promise and a personal guarantee. The biggest failings commonly included
in proposals are:
Especially in a competitive situation, it is very tempting to promise more than you can possibly deliver. Some people will tell you that conservative proposals don't get contracts. Balderdash. The contract is the confirmation of a done deal -- it is part of closing, not part of sales. Overstating what can possibly be delivered is not salesmanship. It is dishonesty.
OK, so you are a writer. Prove it. When approaching a project that has nebulous factors or relationships, be sure to make a stab at defining those factors and relationships in your proposal. For example, the sliding schedule. You propose to document a product that will result from two other projects not currently concluded. Define the flexible relationship between the intellectual bread you will bake and the technological flour yet to be milled from technological grain.
Remember that the proposal should answer questions, not pose them. A proposal that provokes questions isn't worth the paper its printed on. Proposal questions are disputes waiting (eagerly) to happen.
Be not afraid of the simple phrase, "I do not know." Sometimes, you will be asked for a level of precision that amounts to precognition. When an honest statistic can be derived by valid means, then use it in support of your proposal. Some people try to hide indiscriminately sloppy preparation of a proposal behind a veneer of precision. When it works it is obviously dishonest. When it doesn't, it is plainly embarrassing and unprofessional.
Your proposal needs to spell out the promises you are making, but just as importantly, it should also define exactly what you understand your client's promises to you to be. This is another self-defense tactic: a method to avoid moral embarrassment.
There was recently an interesting dilemma posed by a member of the technical writing listserv (an e-mail mailing list): this person submitted a fixed bid ($$$) for an assignment. The bid was accepted. When they got into the project, the discovered that there was much less work involved than they had previously believed. Now they had a dilemma: should they tell the client that it was not so much work? Should they bill the client for less money since it was less work, despite the fact that the bid was a fixed price?
There were basically three classes of response to this question:
The jury was pretty undecided. The voting was split pretty evenly between these options. All three options are morally defensable. When things like this happen to you -- and they will -- you should have already given similar circumstances thought. Any of these options would be better for having been acted on immediately, and worse for a delay of a day, a week, or whatever.
There is nothing I can do for my son that I do not owe to him - his right is my obligation. -- John Brown
The phrase is "discharge of obligations." This makes them seem quite unpopular, which they are. Most people look on an obligation like an odious burden. In fact, to be responsible is to be answerable for something that falls within your sphere of control. As a contractor, you need to be wary of circumstances that define you as responsible without granting you sufficient ability to alter events. There are plenty of managerial types who look on contractors as convenient scapegoats for their own inability to achieve results.
What you are, or should be, responsible for are those outcomes defined in your contract. Unfortunately, technical communication is often something of a nebulous commodity: people often contract the resources that might be required to satisfy a situation that does not exist yet. Such an outcome is categorically difficult to quantify.
In such circumstances, you must keep tabs on your clients' expectations by reporting progress. Every day is not too often, if that is what is required. Sometimes those winds of change blow things about terribly swiftly. Certainly, a weekly status meeting -- one on one, if you can manage that -- is the minimum that is required.
Once you have ensured that you are meeting the current expectations of your client, correctly discharging the current increment of your obligation, you need to then worry about three other classes of obligation: those to your employees, to your co-workers, and to yourself.
What can your employees reasonably assume your obligations to them to be? That depends on how you have represented yourself to them. The least that you are responsible for is their conduct of your business. In theory, it is your responsibility to see that these individuals have the training, the tools, and the opportunity to provide a high quality service to your clients. In practice, most contract employees will be unused to serious supervision or assistance. In many cases they will resist your best efforts on their behalf as interference. Work with your employees to gain and maintain a clear knowledge of what you can expect and require of each other.
What can you expect of the client's employees with whom you work? This is a loaded question in a lot of consulting situations. Remember that many employees will treat you as a temporary disruption of their routine. You may be the boss's darling today, but they plan to be there tomorrow when you've moved on. It is an unspoken aspect of your general obligation to your client that you will work for and establish an efficient, productive, and positive working relationship with the client's staff. Note: unless you have been employed to provide the service of management review of employee performance, you are not there to criticize an employee. Sometimes a co-worker can become such an impediment that you must seek relief from their employer (your client) but this is always a last resort.
Again, much of your success as a consultant will result from your ability to communicate with people. The people in this instance are the clients' employees.
What do you owe yourself? This is the question most people don't
ask and because they don't consciously answer it, they answer it subconsciously
through their actions and attitudes. Once a week you should ask yourself
the following questions:
If the answer to two of these questions is no, then it's time you left this situation and found some better ones. If you don't move on voluntarily, you will be moved. It is time to take the initiative. If you hang on in desperation (or boredom) then you are doing no one any favors, especially yourself. You owe it to yourself to move on.
Only the most pigheaded client won't let you out of a contract if you come to them saying "I am not accomplishing anything and I feel like I am taking your money under false pretenses. I really cannot continue as a consultant on this project in good conscience." A client who has released you from your contract in this way is probably almost as good a reference as a good client for whom you actually did a tangible service.
Text of the STC Ethical Guidelines
Confusion is good - certainty is almost always a sure sign of human error in progress. -- Sybil Bayles
Anyone who has no family or friends, and who has no interests or ambitions outside of work can skip this section. Many contractors, especially in the software development industry, spend many, many more than forty hours per week at work. Stands to reason, since they want to make money and their clients are glad to get the work done. Everyone has had some experience of the week that will never end -- dragging endlessly toward a Friday that drags into Monday morning.
Some people will be saying that it serves the nameless, sleepless contractor right. He/she should get a life. Chances are he/she already has one, but can't quite recall where they left it. This kind of amnesia is most often caused by a confusion of loyalties. You have a responsibility to your client to get the work done. You have a responsibility to yourself to take enough time off to retain your sanity. You have a responsibility to your partner/spouse/children to work as little time as possible, make as much money as possible, and to take no time for your selfish self.
Did I leave anybody out? Sure, I did. Mothers, aunts, sisters, friends, cousins, charities, beautiful weather, church, community, and the dog, to name but a few.
So, what's than answer? There isn't one. There never is and there probably isn't any answer, or if there is it's probably so personal and peculiar to a particular person as to be not of any use to anyone else. We all have a balancing act to negotiate in our professional lives. Being a contractor just throws some parts of that act into high relief. As an employee, you might operate on the theory that putting in extra hours (with no pay) is required, that is if you want to remain an employee. As a contractor, we come again to that fearsome spectre of billable hours: this isn't any theory -- this is a fact. More hours equals more money -- often a lot more money.
Some people manage their balancing act by making a time budget. Simply stated, the budget allots so many hours per week, or per month to your clients, your family, yourself, and anyone/anything else you want to put into the equation. If you have to take time away from group B to make good on a commitment to group A, then you owe group B. If you keep track of these allotments's, then you have some hope of balancing the books eventually in a more or less equitable fashion. At least, when your partner/spouse complains you can answer with facts instead of woeful apologies. If you just let things take care of themselves, then you know they won't: it will be just one more regrettable necessity. Just remember that all that extra money you're making will just about pay for the divorce attorney.
There is another aspect of this complex balancing act as well. Studies have shown that among the self-employed, those who put in substantially fewer than 40 hours per week in their start-up business have a higher frequency of business failure. This just stand to reason. Most people who have successful start-up businesses tend to put more like 55-60 hours per week into their business. "So what else is new?" you ask. The interesting thing is what direction the statistics go when you start looking at people who put in more than 60 hours per week. At 70 hours, the instance of failure is about even with the less than 40 crowd.
What is true for a sole proprietorship is just as true for an independent contractor or an individual contracting through an agency. Most agencies know this and start asking hard questions when the hours crowd up above 50 per week. This is not because they're afraid to bill the client. This is because they know that very few people do their best work during the fourth quarter of a 60 hour week.
From an ethical standpoint, what do you tell your client to balance the commitments you have made to them against other demands on your life? The first thing you tell you client is a realistic and continually updated picture of when your commitments to work assignments will be completed. If it is going to take 50% longer, then say so as close to up front as you can manage.
Text of the STC Ethical Guidelines
If terms to end a dispute leave bad feeling, then what good are they. -- Lao Tazo
Of course, the best way to resolve a dispute is not to have one. The best and only way to accomplish this is to make sure you keep the client in the information loop. Progress, or the lack of it, cooperation, or its absence, roadblocks, or clean sailing, these are all things which the client needs to know every bit as much as you do. Remember that the origin of disputes is almost always ignorance and time. Finding out something after the fact is no picnic, especially when you're picking up the tab for lunch. The most irate rebuke probably began life as a calm reprimand.
OK, now you find yourself in a situation where you think your client
is wrong. There can be many different classes of dispute. Some of these
are:
What you can do about such circumstances depends on how well you have prepared for them. The first rule of contracting is: Keep careful, detailed, and accurate records. This cannot be stressed too highly. These records are your backup in the event of a dispute. These records corroborate your testimony. Without such records, all there is on your side of the argument is hearsay, and everyone knows that the client is always right.
The second rule of contracting is: Keep these records where you can get to them. There have been many contractors who found their records beyond their reach because they kept them on their client's computer. By all means, keep that spreadsheet on the client's computer, but back it up every night and take a copy home on a floppy disk in your pocket.
When the dispute first occurs, stop, look at the records, evaluate dispassionately whether there is any merit in the client's claim. If there is even a shadow of doubt, accept the claim as truth and work with the client to ensure that it never happens again. If the client is not willing to work with you, obtain counsel. Give your attorney all the facts in your possession and do as you are told.
When the dispute is invalid, it is important to calmly explain your position to your client. Make it clear that you do not care who's right, but that you are trying to achieve an equitable settlement that makes everyone happy. Figure out how much ground you can afford to give and then stick to that decision. Make as early a determination of the reasons behind you client's claim as you can. Remember that sometimes people do one thing unrelated to the goal they want to achieve. Listen very carefully to your client and see whether there is any clue to hidden intents.
It is important to know when you can successfully resolve a dispute on your own, and when you are just muddying the waters for your attorney. The defining point is reached when you are not succeeding in accomplishing anything. At that point, you have fought the good fight, stuck to your ethical guns, and left the field undecided. You can then either let the matter drop (if your attorney says this is an option) or you can pursue the matter with the assistance of a judge.
Text of the STC Ethical Guidelines
It is not important that we have striven for perfection, and failed. What is important is that we aprehend the margin of our failure. -- Herbert Bloom
The word "Quality" has been much over used lately. There is only the occasional advertisement that doesn't promise it. In fact, it has been promised so much, in so many ways, and for so many things that it has barely a shred of meaning to its name. The word originally meant the character or nature of a thing such as distinguishes it from other things. "Give her what comforts the quality of her passion shall require," said Shakespere. He was implying nothing about the goodness or quantity of her passion, nor was he recommending that her comfort should wait on a value judgment.
The origin of our current meaning of quality comes from the products we buy. There are many qualities that flour may manifest. Some of these we judge to be good, while others are judged bad. By inference, flour of good quality shall have a preponderance of the good qualities and fewer of the bad ones. In the same way, a person of good quality shall manifest more positive attributes than negative ones.
What then is (good) quality work? The work is a product, the result
of labor of mind and hand, of resource and creativity. Those qualities
that confer the mantle of "quality" on a work are:
The first three items in this list are matters of good writing. These require skill, attention to detail, access to information, and a commitment to professional standards. All the good ethics in the world will not make you a good and skillful writer. Talent, application, practice, and a willingness to make mistakes and to learn from them probably will result in a professionally competent technical writer, eventually.
The last three items in this list have nothing, strictly speaking, to do with writing, but they do have a definite effect of how your writing is perceived. The biggest influence on these factors you can have is by listening effectively to your client, to your client's staff and to your client's audience. You have to keep note of factors that will skew the client's opinion and make a conscious effort to address those factors. Be especially tuned to objections your client may voice. Be eager and ready to accept (and profit from) criticism at any time. Above all, you and you client should agree 110% about the audience for your technical writing.
What you think of the quality of your writing does not matter 2 cents. If one spelling mistake convinces the client that your skills are feeble, then it does not matter if no one has every achieved such concise clarity concerning this subject matter. You have to maintain your position of professional expertise and authority. You and your client must agree that you are the expert.
Text of the STC Ethical Guidelines
Maybe, you think, you can shame them a little, but that doesn't work - better you should show them; aha! this might work. -- Morris Goldbadtt
As you can see, ethics are more than "doing the right thing." To behave ethically and to be seen to be ethical requires dedication, the development of specialized skills, cleverness in dealing with (sometimes) less than ethical people, and a personal commitment. It is that personal commitment that separates a true professional from a well paid hack. It is the personal dedication to the ideals of honesty, of excellent quality, and of professional service that ensure a long, successful, and satisfying career as a technical communicator.