ABSTRACT
As I discussed and illustrated in Emergence of a Tradition, much technical or practical writing existed in the English Renaissance, and the quantity continued to increase throughout the 17th century. Demand for practical writing grew from 1475 to 1700 because of (1) the expansion of knowledge and reading and (2) the improvement in print technology that allowed more books to be printed and distributed to a population that became increasingly literate. Comparing the print versions of The Short-Title Catalogs [1, 2] makes clear the increase of the printed word and the variety of documents, and the reading audience. General descriptions and examples of some of the first Royal Society works exemplify the Society’s contribution to knowledge through its writing, much of it exemplifying early attempts at process analysis, instructions, descriptions, proposals, and then analytical reports needed to develop English industries and government, one of the original goals of the Society. These genres appeared in medieval and Renaissance documents, but this chapter will describe the changes in the 17th century English milieu, the rise of the new science, and the resulting works of many Royal Society members. To present their research, these thinkers developed documents that anticipated modern technical writing. These major genres initially existed to assist industrialists, artisans, craftsmen, seamen, physicians, and agriculturalists in improving their work. Thus, Flowering of a Tradition will begin by focusing on the milieu of the new science with an overview of the technical writing and the virtuosi/scientists who developed it. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 will discuss what are often called the “elements of technical writing”: evolution of English plain style, content development via the paragraph, and a variety of visual design features (drawings and tabular efforts) that helped readers “see” the text and the concepts it presented. The discussion of technical writing’s contribution to the English paragraph is the first of its kind.
