ABSTRACT
If this monograph is successful, technical communication faculty will have material to share with students about the history of this genre of writing. And I believe technical communication is a genre to people who use it and a field of study for students and faculty who have developed undergraduate and graduate degrees in technical communication. From having taught technical writing for over three decades, I find that students have no idea that technical, business, or practical writing is the oldest form of writing, or among the oldest. Literature faculty, to paraphrase Malcolm Richardson and M. T. Clanchy, don’t like to admit that people needed writing to keep track of their possessions and to ensure that work occurred long before they needed literature. As Goody remarked, the Ugarit tablets contained more administrative writing than literature. The preponderance of practical writing has been noted by major scholars, such as Bush, Adolph, Clanchy, Miller, Prestwich, Richardson, and Wright, to name only a few historians. Without practical writing, the world of work on which even literary scholars depend could not survive. Literature existed in oral form longer than business, technical, or practical writing. Literature, with its rhyme, could be remembered. Chapter 5, on the history of instructions, shows that technical writing, at least through the 16th century, incorporated rhyme and poetry. Tusser’s Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry, discussed in Chapter 5, contained abstracts of his advice, also in poetry, in the modern sense of the word. From my research, I find that Tusser’s use of abstract is the first example of its use in English. My research into the history of technical communication and my four decades in the classroom suggest to me that the status of technical communication, as a discipline or even a field of study, is questionable at this time. Unlike medicine, law, agriculture, and the major sciences, we have no history to show our sustained existence in the world-just a collage of articles and a few monographs. My goal in writing Emergence of a Tradition and now Flowering of a Tradition has been to provide more foundation for the presence and the importance of what now
exists as modern technical writing. I am indebted to Malcolm Richardson, whose recent monograph establishes the primacy of practical writing among the English middle class in late medieval England. Studies by many other medieval scholars support this premise. My hope is that historical work will continue on technical writing in both England and the United States during the 18th and 19th centuries. Overarching books on practical writing in England, 1700-1750; a similar book on the 1750-1800 period and also 1800-1900; and similar books on practical writing in the United States would also add to our claim for disciplinary status. In addition, books on history should provide the beginnings of a consensus reading list similar to Albert C. Baugh’s Literary History of England [1], once required reading for English graduate students in many universities, along with many multivolume histories, such as Spiller’s Literary History of the United States [2]. Without more survey works on the history of technical communication to establish its history, we will remain a collection of courses that too often lack continuity. We have no clear philosophy, no common body of knowledge, no theory (except what we borrow from other disciplines). However, we have made solid connection with Aristotelian rhetoric that has worked and continues to work well in the world of work. The importance is determining audience(s), purpose(s), and context(s) for writing at work, which helps ensure the effectiveness of what we write. And Aristotelian rhetoric has saved us from the destructive viciousness of postmodern theories that aver that the world of work, major corporations, and business of all kinds is evil and destructive to society. For all documents we either develop or analyze, we can focus on readers, purposes, contexts, and design principles without moving into the weeds of politics that come and go like the winds. In unearthing-pillaging the tombs of noncanonical texts-to find and describe technical/practical writing from the 13th through the 17th centuries in England, I have found that Aristotelian rhetoric enables me to make sense of what I have found and continue to find. And if technical communication faculty disparage the world of work, then we must show how our departments and our universities are not, in essence, large businesses, even multi-campus corpora - tions. What I cannot recommend is presenting articles featuring new historical texts, hidden for centuries, and discussing them from a postmodern perspective or a feminist or an environmental rhetoric standpoint. I have seen too many historical texts distorted in terms of their originating context, intended readers, and their rhetorical purpose to argue for some current trend. Writing history requires ethics and as accurate an analysis as possible. While some of my work in the history of practical writing has involved gender, I have avoided gender in this monograph. Technical, business, and practical writing in general are global, and the focus on gender has been adequately discussed over the past two decades. Again, what technical communi - cation scholars need to do is concentrate on establishing our history. Therefore,
I urge scholars and graduate students to go beyond what I have begun: correct errors you find in my seminal efforts; explore archives of the documents of business, technical, and research organizations that lie quietly in public and university archives across the United States and the United Kingdom. Explore the development of practical genres through these archives. For example, the history of business letters from the Renaissance onward has yet to be written, although many excellent articles exist. Intense analysis of procedures and instruc - tions needs to continue. Not all procedures developed in the same way. Agri - cultural instructions provided a good beginning, as agriculture was funda - mental to all early cultures and to England through the 18th century. However, military science, navigation, medicine, and science procedures all developed with unique strategies. I believe that analysis of visuals (Chapter 4) offers some initial illumination on how early technical writers, themselves scientists and practitioners in a variety of fields, struggled to explain how to do their work and to help readers trying to apply new knowledge. While Emergence of a Tradition shows the sustained existence of technical writing in the English Renaissance, Flowering of a Tradition shows how the initial goals of the Royal Society contributed to the development of technical writing in terms of clear style, reports, and proposals. While plain style had existed for centuries, the efforts of the Royal Society, with the admonition of Wilkins, Glanvill, and the Royal Society Statutes, provided the focus needed to move plain style into the mainstream. As examples show, writers like John Graunt and John Evelyn could move from the ornate “high style,” to the plain or “low style.” What the Royal Society did was rescue English style from the scholastic sophistry of Oxford and Cambridge. The objections of the English Church (Archbishop Laud) and the universities actually nurtured the develop - ment of the new science at Gresham College. The support for the practical, clearly exemplified by Bacon and William Petty, encouraged the Greshamites to move forward. The disdain of the university intelligencia steeped in scholastic tradi - tion and resistant to change reminds me of the disdain that many technical communication faculty still receive from the literati within their universities who believe that theory should take precedence over what is useful and needed by students. We are often held in veiled contempt because we are tarnished with their postmodern contempt for the workplace. In monographs, authors often have chapters that they believe provide sub - stantial contributions to knowledge. Chapter 3 clearly shows that the modern paragraph existed in England in the 15th century, despite claims of compo - sitionists who limit paragraphs to the 19th century, when speech and writing split into separate fields. This error by the first compositionists again exem - plifies what happens when the study of English style is limited to literary and humanistic works, a position that implies that the language of literature has more value than the language of the workplace, despite the quantity of workplace writing.
