History of PTW in England (Old English through Renaissance)

Overview
Technical writing in England dates to the earliest examples of writing. From around the time Beowulf was written, content was being written that was meant to convey information to a specific audience, using, in addition to plain English language, form, spatial organization, images, and genres.

Today, technical communication today can be defined as encompassing three characteristics: “information design, user advocacy, and content and community management”. Technical communicators design and create content with specific users in mind, using genres to help ensure information flows accurately and completely from creator to user. This concept of technical communication applies to writings through England’s history.

This article looks at the history of technical writing in England from its beginnings through the Renaissance period.

Old and Middle English
Technical writing in English dates to the Old English period—the late 10th century. Examples of technical writing from this period include charters, letters, contracts, writs, reports, legal memorandums, financial transactions, and chronicles. In fact, the documents communicating technical information were more prevalent in Old England than written literary works.

Aelfric's Latin Grammar
Aelfric, an English abbot, wrote one of the earliest examples of prose in English—a Latin grammar in English. He created the document by translating and combining from other sources. Aelfric wrote for a specific audience, school-aged children, by using simple language and grammatical conventions.

Bald's Leechbook
Bald’s Leechbook is another example of Old English technical writing. The Leechbook contained instructions for surgical procedures and recipes for herbal remedies. Like Aelfric, Bald used various Latin sources that he translated and combined for a contemporary, Anglo-Saxon audience. Bald uses a table of contents and brief introductions to each chapter—conventions still used in technical writing today.

Chaucer and The Treatise on the Astrolabe
Technical writing continued into the Middle English period with Geoffrey Chaucer’s Treatise on the Astrolabe. Chaucer is well-known for his literary work The Canterbury Tales. But whereas The Tales were written to entertain, Astrolabe was written to instruct a general audience on the use of a specific instrument—a medieval instruction manual. Like the Old English technical writings, Astrolabe is a combination of sources that Chaucer translated into plain English. The language tries to explain and clarify without using the literary devices, such as metaphors or allusions, found in the Canterbury Tales.

Renaissance
The Renaissance period marks the beginning of technical writers embracing text as a technology for communication. Whereas writers in the Old and Middle English periods wrote to capture what would have normally been spoken aloud, Renaissance writers used illustrations, charts, and diagrams. Page design also began to play a role in technical communication, including the use of white space and different fonts and the grouping of related information in brackets.

Major themes of technical writing during the renaissance include astrology, anatomy and medicine, math, and political theory. Major genres include book-length manuals or treatises, scientific discoveries, and correspondence.

Business Letters
Surviving examples of business correspondence in English date back to the 15th century. Medieval business letters adhered to a genre with strict guidelines on the form and syntax. The business letter genre, called ars dictaminis, began as official church correspondence and was written in Latin. European governments adopted the form for their official correspondence and began writing in their local languages. During the 15th century, English merchants and land-owners began using the form for their business correspondence. Because merchants had different goals for their correspondence than church and government officials, the form, diction, and syntax changed to allow for persuasive rhetoric.

Collections of surviving business letters are from the Paston, Plumpton, Stoner, Shillingford, and Gawdy families of England.

Francis Bacon and Plain Style
Like Chaucer in the Medieval period, Francis Bacon has been widely studied as the technical writer of his time. Bacon advocated for the use of plain language as the best way to present technical information, as well as for the importance of how information is organized and presented on the page.

In Novum Organum, Bacon defines what he means by “plain language.” Carol Lipson summarizes Bacon’s definition of plain language as language that “is plain in the sense of being clear [but] it is not plain in the sense of merely using ordinary, simple language.” Literary devices, according to Bacon, are acceptable to use in technical writing if it aids in the reader’s understanding of the concept being explained.