ABSTRACT
As Chapters 1, 2, and 3 discussed and illustrated, the English plain style sentence and paragraph contributed to the organization and clarity of English Renaissance and 17th century technical writing, renowned for its use of visuals to allow readers to “see the text.” But book technology and its relationship to the develop - ment of technical writing before 1700 have not been extensively discussed. However, as I have shown in Emergence of a Tradition, technical writing-most often occurring as instructional writing or descriptions of processes and objects frequently illustrated distinctive page format, document design, and illustrations. When I began my study of early English technical writing, I read Pollard and Redgrave’s Short-Title Catalog, as indicated in Chapter 1, and made a list of works that seemed, according to their titles, like technical writing. By examining nearly all the items on my list either as facsimiles or via microfilm, I was struck by the many examples of format and page design in “technical writing” that differed from religious, humanistic, and popular media printed during the period. Printers, authors, or perhaps both viewed much practical writing in a new way, as a form that needed to be accessed easily and read quickly. While Louis Wright suggested that simplified prose occurred because middle-class readers needed a less academic prose [1], we now know that many of these how-to works were written for use by a wide range of readers who used these texts to learn how to perform work. Thus, style, page design, visuals, and format-enabled by typography, con - tinued to improve throughout the period-set technical and how-to writing apart from other genres of English Renaissance and 17th century printed books. As a result of my three decades of research, I have concluded that many early authors, translators, and printers of these books knew that technical writing
differed from literary, religious, historical, and other humanistic texts in one important way: Traditional texts would be carefully and often meditatively read. In contrast, technical writing helped readers perform tasks. Visuals that supported text and in some cases supplanted text enabled readers to follow descriptions and instructions more easily than linear text by itself. A number of small books composed only of visuals show that authors themselves knew which tasks could be conveyed with little or no text.1 These “picture books” also suggest to modern readers what work was taught via oral instruction and which could (and needed to) be written, to enable readers to learn and apply new steps. In pursuing the Royal Society transactions and publications from 1665 to 1700, I found numerous illustrations, such as those discussed in Chapter 1. Numerous Royal Society Fellows found the value of visuals, drawings, and tabular display in explaining their research. After 1500, printed English technical books, many translations of technical works printed in Germany, Italy, or France, included illustrations used without alteration from the original work. These illustrations were woodcuts-many carefully crafted-or copperplate engravings borrowed from their European sources. These borrowed illustrations show the expertise of Continental printers. In this chapter, I will demonstrate, via excerpts from a range of Renaissance printed technical books, how early technical writing pushed the boundaries of print from 1500 to 1700. In contrast to many humanistic and religious writers who continued to focus on illuminated or decorative books, technical writers and printers during this period found innovative ways to present content that would be easy for readers to understand and use. By the closing decades of the 16th century, technical writing exhibited distinctive visual characteristics enabled by print technology, which continued to develop throughout the 17th century. This chapter will survey major examples of visual design that emerged in Renaissance and then 17th century technical writing and show their value to the development of technical writing in the topics discussed.
