Plain Dealing

Though often considered a product of modern American capitalism, business writing actually has its roots in the epistolary style of the early English Enlightenment. Augustan London, the world's first consumer and mass media culture, simultaneously gave the world the novel and the business letter. For the first time ever, writers could support themselves solely by writing. Unfortunately, even geniuses spent most of their time hacking. The Plain Style, which critics often praise as the glory of Augustan literature, was actually the language of trade, an expression of mass production and standardization. To survive a cruel and volatile market, poets and novelists were compelled to combine artistic imagination with entrepreneurial shrewdness. Indeed, the business of writing, the writing of business, became the chief business of their art.

This article concentrates on Daniel DeFoe, the father of the Plain Style. As merchant, chapman, amateur scientist, and Low Churchman, Defoe valued plain speaking in his personal and business affairs, and practiced it in his fiction and journalism. His seminal pamphlet The Complete English Tradesman (1726), the first business writing textbook, remains an important text. Its thesis still applies: "A tradesman's letter should be plain, concise, and to the purpose. No quaint expres-sions, no book-phrases, no flourishes. And yet they must be full and sufficient to express what he means, so as not to be doubt-ful, much less unintelligible." This pamphlet had a tremendous influence on Benjamin Franklin, whose Autobiography (1791) and how-to-succeed tracts are the fountainhead of American business prose. Using excerpts from DeFoe and Franklin, I will demonstrate how the rhetoric and ethos of 18th century English mercantile culture still influence business writing in an age of faxes, modems, and multinationals. From Grub Street to Walnut Street, from Walnut Street to Wall Street, the same techniques sells—even after 270 years.

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