Ties That Bind: Ancient Epistolography and
Modern Business Communication
John Hagge
Recently, critics of business communication have claimed that many
principles of the field repeat themselves from one generation to the
next (for example, see Pauly, Moran and Moran, and Selzer). I will argue
that these critics are right: not only have the leading principles of
the field been transmitted through generations of textbooks beginning
around 1910, but several striking parallels between the 2000-year-old
Greek and Roman epistolographic, or letter-writing, tradition and modem
business communication exist. Just as business communication textbooks
do today, ancient epistolographic manuals recommended adaptation to
the letter-writer’s audience, natural, everyday speech, and at
least three of the so-called "C’s" of effective communication:
conversational tone, clarity, and conciseness. Just as textbooks do
today, these letter-writing manuals took pains to develop elaborate
typologies to classify letters. And just as today business communication
stands at the fringes of the educational establishment, so in the ancient
world epistolography never was fully integrated into the system of classical
education; indeed, much of the ancient world considered epistolographic
instruction vulgar, suited only for the superficially educated.
The Tenets of Business Communication: Modern or Ancient?
The field’s tendency toward the repetition of platitudes is not
condemned by those who pioneered the modern teaching of university-level
business communication courses during the first quarter of the twentieth
century. In fact, while trying to legitimize their discipline, they
argued exactly the opposite: that business communication rests on principles
hallowed by time and sanctioned by having been passed along through
the generations. A few of these pioneering business communication teachers
tried to trace the rhetorical roots of the field back at least to the
Renaissance. For instance, in a 1938 article Hugh Sargent argues that
“most of the principles we teach in our modern handbooks of letter
writing are ‘time-tested'" and traces these principles, albeit
in cursory fashion, to the Renaissance rhetorics of William Fulwood,
Angell Day, Gregorius Macropedius, Christopher Hegendorff, Vives, and
Erasmus (5-6). In his 1940 presidential address to the second annual
convention of the American Business Writing Association (a precursor
of ABC), Robert Aurner, who wrote one of the first textbooks in the
field, sounds a similar strain by noting that “business writing
is rooted in an ancestry centuries in length and is founded upon a tradition
interesting to observe" (7). He too refers in passing to Fulwood
and Day. And in a classic defense of the field, William P. Boyd claims
that if his were a “500-page research paper,” he would “pause
for a look at early Greek letters”:
A doctoral dissertation on The Form of the Ancient Greek Letter by a
Norbertine brother in the National Catholic University in the late 1930’s
documents the pre-Christian letter writer, seated with stylus in hand,
as falling into a fixed pattern of salutation and closing, and also
using standard letter-writing jargon, to convey his message. In the
early Christian literature, the Epistles in the New Testament attest
to similar persistent letter forms. Indeed it was the church’s
role as the preserver of learning that established the modern five-part
letter form. (“Heritage” 7)
Boyd, who never mentions the “Norbertine brother” by name
and who appears to get the work’s publication date wrong, must
be referring to Francis X. J. Exler’s The Form of the Ancient
Greek Letter (Dissertation, Catholic University of America, 1923; see
Doty 5, n.3). But although some pioneering business writing authorities
did take a brief glance at the rhetorical roots of their field, to the
best of my knowledge (based on a comprehensive literature review of
the Bulletin and Journal of the Association for Business Communication
since they began publication), little serious scholarship linking the
classical, medieval, or Renaissance rhetorical traditions to principles
of business communication taught today exists. Boyd’s cryptic
paragraph may be the only reference to an ancient epistolographic manual
in the business communication literature.1
Rather than pay lip-service to the rhetorical tradition, pioneering
college business communication instructors like Aumer and Boyd were
much more likely to assert the essential modernity of the field’s
principles when attempting to defend their field (Hagge, “Orphaned
Discipline”). Those principles were legitimate—so the argument
went—just because they had been developed around the turn of the
century and had stood the test of time since then. The work of Jack
Menning typifies this tactic. Menning traces the development of such
chestnuts as conversational tone, you-viewpoint, adaptation, concrete
diction and positive emphasis in two similar articles (“Principles”
and “Half Century”), taking pains to show that “modem”
business communication practice, which incorporates the principles he
is investigating, is far superior to earlier, especially nineteenth-century,
methods, and giving 1900 as the beginning of a new kind of business
writing:
If you look back over the business-letter literature of 1900-1910, you
will see that the professional letter writers of the day build up a
set of principles that are merely made more concrete and specific in
later application. What today’s writers do is retest and confirm
what earlier prominent men agreed were the desirable fundamentals of
letter writing. With each test by use and with each restatement, there
is some improvement, some refinement of a principle worth our attention.
(“Principles” 17; see also “Half Century” 4)
It is clear from the conclusion of his article that Menning justifies
the principles he discusses just because they have stood the test of
time. Over and over again in his summary, he points out that the principles
of business communication he considers important date from around 1906
to 1911. Menning summarizes his position by appealing to a criterion
of use:
These principles are not merely the product of thoughtful analysis;
they are the result of a half a century of test-by-use. True, many of
them have not been supported by carefully controlled, formalized research
studies. Indeed, much research needs to be done. But until it is, the
correspondent who does not take advantage of these suggestions is closing
his eyes to what experience has shown, over and over again, is the more
desirable procedure. (“Principles” 31)
That such an attitude still lives after nearly thirty years is demonstrated
by a quotation from the 1986 edition of one of the best-selling (Suchan
162) business communication textbooks on the market today. The sentiments,
even the phraseology, markedly resemble Menning’s:
Successful business communication is also the result of a conscious
use of principles that have evolved since the turn ofthe century. No
one would claim that business communication is an exact and thoroughly
developed science, but prominent business writers who have experimented
with letters and memos for over 80 years have given us a near-scientific
framework of empirical principles as a starting point. (Wilkinson, Wilkinson,
and Vik 7; emphasis added)
In similar attempts to gain credibility for “modern” business
communication, other investigators have tried to trace its beginnings
to some well-known early figure in the field. Weeks argues that it was
George Burton Hotchkiss in 1916 “who first emphasized the principle
of the ‘you’ attitude and talked about the ‘five C’s’
of business writing” (202). Boyd attempts to show that such often-cited
principles as “you-attitude” and the AIDA scheme for organizing
sales letters stem from the work of advertising psychologist Walter
Dill Scott, who published his influential The Theory of Advertising
in 1903 (“Psychological Aspects”). Scott’s ideas were
quickly incorporated into the first generation of business communication
textbooks (Boyd. “Psychological Aspects” 8-9). Boyd, like
Aurner an ABWA president, reworks much of this material again as he
searches for antecedents of the notions of “you-attitude,”
conversational tone, conciseness, and positive suggestion in an address
given to celebrate the twenty-first aniversary of ABWA (“Heritage”).
Likewise, Daniel attempts to show how “modern” were the
letter-writing principles of direct-mail proponent and advertising genius
Sherwin Cody.
The Ancient Epistolographic Tradition
However, such efforts to legitimize the field are naive, since as I
shall demonstrate, many commonplaces of business communication are not
particularly “modern” but ultimately derive from classical
rhetoric, and specifically from the ancient epistolographic tradition.
That almost all modem business communication scholarship makes no mention
of this tradition, especially Greek and Roman letter-writing theory,
is not surprising. Classicists themselves have tended to concentrate
on only part of this tradition: “literary” letters, many
of which were composed by writers considered interesting for other reasons.
Among the most important of these are Plato, Demosthenes, and Isocrates
(whose corpora of letters some scholars consider wholly or partially
spurious; see Hackforth and Rees). Also important are Seneca, the younger
Pliny, and of course Cicero. And there are Ovid, whose Heroides are
dramatic monologues in letter-form from legendary women like Medea to
absent lovers, and Horace, whose Epistula ad Pisones students of literary
criticism know by another name, the “Art of Poetry.” Finally,
there are Christian epistolographers such as St. Basil, St. John Chrysostom,
and St. Gregory Nazianzus, and on the Latin side Ambrose, Jerome, and
Augustine. Obviously, philologists also have studied the epistles that
make up the bulk of the New Testament.
Such was the state of epistolographic scholarship until 1897. Then,
electrified by an astonishing discovery in an obscure Egyptian town,
the world of epistolography changed markedly. The town was Oxyrhynchus.
The discovery: thousands of papyrus fragments, most dating from Hellenistic
or Roman times, preserved since then by desert sands. Among these were
hundreds of letters written for quotidian, not literary, reasons, many
of which fell under the rubric of “business communications.”2
The Biblical scholar Adolf Deissmann immediately realized the importance
of these letters for better understanding the form and structure of
the New Testament epistles, especially those in the theologically important
Pauline corpus.
Although his claim that the papyrus letters found in Oxyrhynchus and
elsewhere constitute the “liveliest instantaneous photographs
of ancient life” (228) has been challenged, Deissmann still remains
the father of modem epistolographic studies. In New Testament research,
these loom rather large; for some time, scholars have been interested
not only in the papyrus letters themselves, but in trying to determine
to what extent the classical rhetorical tradition, and especially the
few extant ancient letter-writing manuals, influenced the composition
of these letters. Unfortunately, since they also may appear forbiddingly
esoteric—often assuming that readers are familiar with koine Greek,
Latin, perhaps Aramaic and Syriac, and several modem languages—epistolographic
studies have remained mostly inaccessible to scholars researching the
history of rhetoric or of business communication.
In addition, epistolography, as a latecomer to scholarship, still suffers
the woes of all new disciplines. Doty points out that “up to the
present time epistolary research has remained scattered and fragmentary.
There are few if any comprehensive treatments of epistle in English
. . .“ (ix; also see Malherbe 3). The work of Doty and Malherbe
themselves, as well as that of others such as Kim, Stowers, and White,
go far in rectifying this lack. Yet the enterprising researcher in the
history of rhetoric or business communication will find the area of
ancient epistolography still quite uncharted, and thus an immensely
fruitful territory.
The great Greek and Roman rhetoricians refer to letter-writing techniques
only tangentially, perhaps because epistolographic instruction was considered
rather vulgar, a point to which I will return later. Aristotle does
not mention letter-writing per se. Cicero shows “many points of
contact with Greek letter theory, but his comments on the types of letters
are not the basis for an epistolographic system, nor are they part of
such a system” (Malherbe 6). Seneca, too, knows the traditional
typological descriptions of letters but like Cicero displays little
systematic epistolographic knowledge; and Quintilian refers only causally
to letter-writing systems (Malherbe 6-7; Kennedy, Roman World 487-514
and 615-616). Thus, we need to turn to the lesser-known rhetorical theorists
for accounts of ancient letter-writing technique. The treatise De Elocutione,
once thought to be the work of Demetrius of Phalerum, contains the first
fully formulated account. This treatise, most famous for its discussion
of the four rhetorical styles—plain, grand, elegant, and forceful—was
written in Greek, perhaps in the first century A.D. (Malherbe 4; Schenkeveld
135-48), although scholars dispute the date.3 Pseudo-Demetrius’s
views on letter-writing occur as a short excursus (sections 223-35)
at the end of his discussion of the plain style, the highlights of which
follow:
*
The letter resembles one side of a dialogue, but should be written more
carefully, since dialogue imitates impromptu conversation but a letter
is a piece of writing sent to someone as a gift, so disjointed clauses
and sentences are out of place in it.
*
The letter should be written in propria persona; a writer’s character
shines forth nowhere more than in a letter.
*
Letters should not be too long nor too dignified in style. Letters are
not treatises but expressions of one’s friendly feelings, one’s
“affection and courtesy.”
*
Thus, a letter should be written “in simple language,” in
a mixture of the elegant and the plain styles, although writers of letters
“must adjust them to the personage to whom they are addressed.”
(Grube 111-13)
Later authorities on letter-writing embellish and emend Demetrius’s
advice. Two important epistolographic handbooks are anonymous. The first,
Typoi Epistolikoi (Epistolary Types), is said—most likely without
good cause—to have been written by Demetrius of Phalerum, also
the supposed author ofDe Elocutione. The second, Epistolimaioi Charakteres
(Epistolary Styles), has been attributed either to Libanius or to Proclus
the Neoplatonist, again most likely without foundation. Dates for the
former work range from 200 B.C. to A.D. 300 and for the latter from
between the fourth and sixth centuries A.D. (texts in Foerster, Weichert;
texts and translations in Malberbe). Julius Victor was a Latin rhetorician
of the fourth century A.D. whose Ars Rhetorica included a section, de
epistolis, concerning the proper style of letters (text in Halm; partial
text and translations in Malherbe). Flavius Philostratus (third century
A.D.), better known for his account of the Second Sophistic, Lives of
the Sophists, and the author of a collection of homoerotic letters (Bowersock),
also composed a short letter-writing manual in Greek:
De Epistulis (texts in Kayser, Malherbe). Finally, St. Gregory Nazianzus,
one of the Four Fathers of the Eastern Orthodox Church, left letters
noted for their graceful, witty style; one covers letter-writing techniques
(texts in Gallay, Malherbe). Although these authors make up a rather
heterogeneous collection, most of them agree quite uniformly that letters
should be composed in certain ways, ways that jibe remarkably well with
the precepts of “modern” business communication textbooks.
Audience Adaptation
One leading idea of “modern” business communication is
audience adaptation. Menning connects this principle with the development
of applied psychology at the beginning of the twentieth century (“Principles”
20). Sherwin Cody strongly advocated audience adaptation in his Success
in Letter Writing, Business and Social (1906; Menning “Principles”
21). Menning also argues that “in 1916, Hotchkiss and Drew stressed
the necessity of adaptation to the character and language of the reader”
(“Principles” 21) and adaptation “to the mood of the
reader” (22). “Every day,” Menning writes in conclusion,
“some successful letter writer confirms and supplements this basic
principle. And remember: It has been tested for over forty years”
(22).
But the idea of audience adaptation had not been extant for only about
forty years when Menning penned his rather naive words in 1960. In fact,
James Willis Westlake suggested adaptation to readers’ various
moods as early as 1876 in his How to Write Letters, a long-ignored work
that anticipates many “modern,” twentieth-century developments
in business communication.4 (For a more complete treatment, see Hagge,
“Spurious.”) Moreover, the concept of audience adaptation
cannot be “modern” because it is one of the cornerstones
of the classical and medieval rhetorical traditions. Ancient epistolographers
certainly advocated audience adaptation. As we have seen, the De Elocutione
recommends that letters should be adapted to their audiences. Several
other authorities agree that “letters must be adapted to the circumstances
and mood of their addressees” (Malherbe 16). The intoduction to
the Typoi Epistolilcoi argues that although letters “can be composed
from a great number of specific types of style,” they “take
their shape from among those which always fit the particular circumstance
to which they are addressed” (Malherbe 29).
Cicero and Philostratus also agree that letter-writers should adapt
to their readers (Malherbe 16), while Gregory of Nazianzus goes a step
further and suggests that “the best and most beautiful letter
is the one that is persuasive to the uneducated and educated alike,
appearing to the former as written on the popular level, and to the
latter as above that level, a letter which is furthermore understood
at once” (Malherbe 57). The last quotation sounds a surprisingly
“modern” note with its advice on adapting a document to
multiple groups of readers, some of whom have a greater degree of knowledge
than others; for instance, Mathes and Stevenson’s Designing Technical
Reports, often cited as a locus classicus for contemporary ideas on
audience adaptation in professional writing, offers similar advice.
Stylistic Norms
Stylistic norms also are similar in the ancient epistolographic and
“modem” business communication traditions. The few writers
who have tried to trace the development of business communication principles
agree that the dictum that business prose should be written in a simple,
natural, conversational style is a “modern,” twentieth-century
advance over beknighted earlier practices (for example, see Daniel “Cody”
10; Menning, “Principles” 18; Menning, “Half Century”
4-5). Pioneering business communication textbook writers often praised
their own work for its tendency to break away from what they considered
the stilted, unnatural, fusty style of nineteenth-century business writing.
Cody, for instance, inveighs against the “peculiar language employed
in business letters only”: telegraphic, stereotyped locutions
like “beg to advise,” “in regard to same,” and
the like. These give “a stiff, formal, meaningless cast to a letter,
which takes away its winning quality” (26). Instead, “the
style in which a business letter ought to be written is that of a simple,
natural conversation” (27). Likewise, George Burton Hotchkiss,
whose principles of business communication can be traced “from
his 1916 book [Business English, Principles and Practice, written with
Celia Anne Drew) down to the latest editions of some of our current
popular textbooks” (Weeks 202), stressed the “modern”
notion of conversational tone as opposed to the supposedly unnatural
style of business communications in the previous century. In his Business
English (1911), moreover, Hotchkiss includes a chapter entitled “Smith
Sees the Light,” in which the General Manager of the (fictional)
Washington Knitting Works exhorts his letter writer Smith to abjure
the worn-out and hackneyed locutions with which he is wont to write
in favor of “simple, straight-from-the-shoulder language with
no words that might not be used in conversation” (32).
But the claim that early twentieth-century business communication textbook
writers like Hotchkiss invented the concept of simple, natural, conversational
language for practical correspondence is largely, I believe, a self-promoting
myth.5 Again, James Willis Westlake anticipated this idea by at least
thirty years in his book on letter-writing (78,83,84). George Douglas
has shown that at least some nineteenth-century business writing was
forthright, simple, and direct. And again, advocacy of a simple,
natural, conversational style antedates what happened in nineteenth-century
America by two millennia. It is another leading precept of ancient letter-writing
manuals. For instance, De Elocutione suggests that letters should be
written in the plain style: “the style of letter-writing.., requires
the simple manner” (section 223; Grube ill). The content of the
letter and its style should match: a “letter should be a brief
expression of one’s friendly feelings, expressing a simple topic
in simple language” (section 231; Grube 113). Pseudo-Demetrius
also opts for natural syntax—’ ‘The structure of the
letter should be loose” (section 229; Grube I 12)—and for
natural, perhaps even earthy, diction. He also warns that letters should
not be preachy or “too dignified in language” (section 228;
Grube 112). However, he does caution that letters should not be overly
spontaneous or conversational (sections 226 and 224).
Other ancient epistolographic manuals and rhetorical treatises agree
by and large with this analysis. In passing, Quintilian yokes the genres
of dialogue and letter, which, he says, have a “looser texture”
(soluta) , whereas other forms of discourse prefer a style “closely
welded and woven together” (vincta atque contexta; 9,4, 19; trans.
Butler 517). Seneca makes no bones about his preference for the conversational
style in letters (Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales, 75, 1 [Gummere 137]).
Cicero concurs that letters should be written in everyday speech (Ad
Familiares 9, 21, 1). St. Gregory advises letter-writers to “avoid
prose-like style so far as possible, and rather incline towards the
conversational [to lalikon I” (Malherbe 57). But as do other epistolographic
authorities, Gregory takes pains to forestall any misunderstanding of
what he means by “conversational,” for letters also need
to be charming. So Gregory appears to recommend a middle way between
a stark, simple, Stoic style and that reserved for other, more literary
types of discourse (Malherbe 57). Other theorists also recommend a moderate
style (Malherbe 16-17). Thus, the idea that correspondence should be
written in a fairly conversational style is not a principle of’
communication discovered by twentieth-century business writing pioneers
but a leading precept of the ancient rhetorical and epistolographic
traditions.
The “C’s” of Good Writing
Finally, some of the well-known “C’s” of “modem”
business communication also may be found as precepts repeated in ancient
epistolographic works. Weeks (202) credits George Burton Hotchkiss with
first talking about “five C’s” of effective communication
in his 1916 textbook, co-authored by Celia Anne Drew. However, it can
easily be shown that the “C’s” (of which, seven or
eight—Conciseness, Clarity, Correctness, Conversational Tone,
Character, Correctness, Completeness, and Coherence—often appear
in the literature) developed rather earlier than that. Hotchkiss mentions
most of the “C’s” in his 1911 textbook. Sherwin Cody
used many of the ideas later known as the “C’s” as
early as 1906, although he did not connect them as coherently as did
Hotchkiss or invent the alliterating “C’s” mnemonic.
Cody considered clarity a cardinal virtue for correspondence, recommended
conciseness in letters, and emphasized grammatical correctness (23-24
and 29). Commercial Correspondence andPostallnformation by Carl Lewis
Altmaier (1904) also contains clear references to some of the “C’s.”
In the third chapter, “The Composition of a Business Letter,”
Altmaier lists the “elements” of that genre as “clearness,”
“terseness,” “coherency,” “completeness,”
“exactness,” “method,” and “courtesy”
(vii-vii and 44-55). Weeks mentions Altmaier’s book, although
he omits its date of publication and says nothing about its references
to the “C’s.” Boyd, Daniel, and Menning do not cite
it at all. Finally, in How to Write Letters, Westlake lists three of
the “C’s”: “The chief requisites of a business
letter are clearness, correctness, and conciseness” (108). (For
a more complete discussion of the development of the “C’s,”
see Hagge, “Spurious.”)
Ancient epistolography, as we have seen, recognized the concept of
“conversational tone” as a desideratum for the writing of
letters in a way that appears strikingly to resemble the dicta of “modern”
business communication textbooks. The ancient epistolographic manuals
also address clarity and conciseness in terms that sound as if they
might have come directly from a twentieth-century business communication
text. Malherbe summarizes what the epistolographic tradition says about
such stylistic stipulations:
Letters must be concise.
Brevity is highly desirable . . . but a reaction against overly brief
letters can be detected. . . . The subject matter should determine length,
and clarity, above all, should not be sacrificed for conciseness.
Letters must be clear in what they say.
Clarity is already a presupposition for other prescriptions in Demetrius
(De Elocutione 226), and is stressed by later theorists . . . .(16)
Doty agrees that conciseness, clarity, and conversational tone were
leading concepts in the presentation of epistolographic style: “as
far as style is concerned, we can list brevity as the key” (14);
“clarity was especially required”; and “language used
in letters was supposed to be modeled on the everyday speech of educated
men, without slipping into vulgarities” (15). These stylistic
norms for ancient epistolographic communication most likely derive from
Aristotle’s discussion of style in Rhetoric III. Aristotle’s
development there of the concept of the virtues of style provides the
basis for virtually all subsequent treatments in classical rhetoric,
although inconsistencies in Aristotle’s presentation do occur
(Kennedy, Persuasion in Greece 104). Besides, Aristotle’s concrete
pronouncements on how one achieves a clear, pure style are not particularly
helpful: besides a “subtle” account of metaphor (Kennedy,
Persuasion in Greece 107), Aristotle’s advice boils down to use
of the proper nouns and verbs, use of appropriate connectives, selection
of specific rather than general words, avoidance of ambiguities, and
observance of proper gender of nouns and number of verbs. Theophrastus,
whose treatment of style—derived mainly from Aristotle—was
highly influential (Kennedy, Persuasion in Greece 273), lists four cardinal
virtues of style: purity, clarity, propriety, and ornamentation. These
stylistic desiderata are repeated with few changes in Cicero and Quintilian.
Conciseness or brevity, while part of this scheme (for example, see
Cicero, De Oratore 3.49) generally falls as a subcategory under clarity.
The Stoics appear responsible for adding brevity as another master stylistic
category (Kennedy, Persuasion in Greece 294, 329).
But in the epistolographic tradition, conciseness and clarity often
are linked: obviously, a letter that must convey much content may be
fairly lengthy; otherwise, undue compression of the material will result
in unclearness. Julius Victor links the virtues of conciseness and clarity
(as well as what might be called “conversational tone”)
in his advice on writing “official” letters:
Characteristic of this type are weighty statements, clarity of diction,
and special effort at terse expression, as well as the rules of oratory,
with one exception, that we prune away some of its great size and let
an appropriate familiar style govern the discourse. (Malherbe 59).
Victor also links brevity and clarity in his account of personal letters.
Other writers appeal to the classical notion of the mean as they link
clarity and conciseness. On this Philostratus and Pseudo-Libanius, author
of the Epistolimaioi Charakteres, agree:
Philostratus of Lemonos says it best. . . . 48. One should adorn the
letter, above all, with clarity, and with moderate conciseness and with
archaism in style . . . .49. In any case, one should not destroy clarity
with conciseness or chatter on immoderately while being attentive (to
the need for) clarity, but should aim at moderation by imitating accurate
archers. A man who is clever and skilled at hitting the target does
not far overshoot the target and so widely miss what is at hand . .
. . In the same way, an eloquent man does not chatter on unbecomingly,
nor does he cling to terseness in speech because he is at a loss (as
to how to express himself) to the point that he obscures the clarity
of his letters. . . .50. The length of the letter must be determined
by its subject matter, and in no way should fulness of treatment be
regarded as a fault. It is, indeed, occasionally necessary to draw out
certain letters as need demands. (Malherbe 69)
St. Gregory makes the same point using almost exactly the same imagery
(Epistulae 51, 1-2; Malherbe 57).
Clearly, ancient epistolography was, for all intents and purposes,
of one mind. Its extremely uniform precepts were known as commonplaces
to most literate writers, even though they may not have had formal training
in letter-writing. Thus, Pliny can advise, “be brief and employ
simple vocabulary in a direct style” (L. 7.9.8.; Stowers 35).
To anyone who has taught a business communication course, these commonplaces
in the ancient epistolographic manuals should seem extremely familiar.
It would appear to be a fair statement, then, to say that those who
claim that business communication instruction rests on “modern”
principles first developed at the beginning of the twentieth century
are either disingenuous or deluded. Many principles of business communication
are no more than rhetorical commonplaces passed on almost unthinkingly
from the author of one letter-writing manual—whether ancient or
modern—to another. Nor are these principles “scientific,”
as Wilkinson, Wilkinson, and Vik and others have claimed; these principles
have not been validated by use because their employment has always been
taken for granted. Thus, the evidence I have presented suggesting a
number of parallels between allegedly “modern” business
communication principles and the epistolary desiderata espoused in several
ancient letter-writing manuals gives additional force to the claim that
many fundamental principles of business communication rest on “folk
wisdom based on tradition and blind faith” (Moran and Moran 313,
315).
Generic Typologies
In addition, there are other ways in which “modern” business
communication resembles the ancient epistolographic tradition. Both,
for example, developed elaborate generic typologies under which all
the various kinds of letters are supposed to fall. A glance at any contemporary
business communication textbook will show that this is so. Chapter by
chapter, these textbooks proceed, dividing their material into categories
that have been repeated through the generations back to around 1915.
Letters of inquiry, claims, adjustments, credit collections, applications—the
list remains uniform from one textbook to the next. One would expect
the ancients, who often display a well-known predilection for categorization,
to have used a similar scheme. And indeed they did. Julius Victor, as
we have seen, distinguishes between official and personal letters (litterae
negotiales etfamiliares), and Cicero uses at least two classificatory
methods. The first scheme divides letters into public and private (Pro
Flacco 37; Malherbe 15). Another divides letters into those that relate
factual information and those that convey the mood of the writer; the
latter category divides again into the genus familiare et iocosum and
the genus severum et grave (Malherbe 15).
But two other works put these simple typologies to shame. The Epistolary
Types of Pseudo-Demetrius puts letters into twenty-one stylistic categories:
“friendly, commendatory, blaming, reproachful, consoling, censorious,
admonishing, threatening, vituperative, praising, advisory, supplicatory,
inquiring, responding, allegorical, accounting, accusing, apologetic,
congratulatory, ironic, thankful” (Malherbe 29). Although these
letter-types do not correspond in a one-to-one fashion with “modern”
classificatory schemes, some obvious parallels exist. More important,
in both the ancient and modern schemes, the dominant means of classification
appears to be the aim of the writer to accomplish some sort of rhetorico-pragmatic
goal—not some equally plausible organizing principle like structure.
That is, both letters in both the ancient and “modern” systems
are categorized by speech-act type: to inquire, to condole, to congratulate,
to complain, and so on. PseudoLibanius also uses such a classificatory
scheme in his Epistolary Styles, in which letters fall into an overwhelming
forty-one types (Malherbe 63). Such classificatory schemes may strike
modern readers as silly and jejune. Yet a moment’s reflection
should establish that “modern” business communication textbooks
do exactly the same thing.
Academic Status
Likewise, both ancient epistolography and “modern” business
communication have struggled to gain acceptance into the educational
establishment of their respective eras. For example, I have demonstrated
elsewhere how twentieth-century business communication instructors from
1936 to the present have indicated time and time again that they consider
their discipline a “step-child” or “orphan,”
to be shunted from one department to another in the university community
(“Orphaned Discipline”). Two national reports on education
have been highly critical of business communication instruction (Johnson
and Hartley, Gordon and Howell), much to the distress of members of
the field. Even relatively recently, academics in the field of business
communication have felt the need to write articles such as “Explaining
Business Communication Courses to English Departments” (David)
and “Making Business Communication Courses Academically Respectable”
(Locker). Another article by David published as recently as 1982 demonstrates
that business communication is almost alone among university fields
of study in not having one uniform departmental home: over half the
business courses in her survey were placed in a business department,
less than one-fifth in an English department, and the rest distributed
among departments of business education, vocational and career development,
office administration, and secretarial science (“Report”).
Perhaps most telling of all: a 1983 opinion piece by Daniel argues that
business communication professors should be content with their “secondary”
status in the academic world, give up any pretensions towards developing
a true research-oriented discipline, and get back to teaching students
how to write effective business communications (“Remembering”).
Ancient epistolography also seems to have been a field without a permanent
home in the educational system of the day, and perhaps more important,
a field little respected by cultivated, literate persons. Malherbe reports
that it is “clear that letter writing was of interest to rhetoricians,
but it appears only gradually to have attached itself to their rhetorical
systems” (7). Stowers is even more blunt:
Letter writing remained only on the fringes of formal rhetorical education
throughout antiquity. It was never integrated into the rhetorical systems
and thus does not appear in the standard handbooks. This means that
there were never any detailed systematic rules for letters, as there
were for standard rhetorical forms. (34)
When letter-writing was included in the rhetorical curriculum, it enjoyed
a secondary status at best. Those who gave epistolary instruction were
business-school teachers who trained people in such things as stenography
and letter writing as preparation especially for the civil service (Stowers
33). The two handbooks that contain elaborate classification typologies,
Typoi Epistolilcoi and the Epistolimaioi Charakteres, “were designed
for the less educated in learning how to write letters” (Malherbe
II). This we know just because these handbooks do stress classificatory
schemes and present model letters to illustrate each scheme. As Stowers
notes, “Like most other instruction in antiquity, letter writing
was taught by the imitation of models rather than through theory and
comprehensive rules” (33). Since they stressed the imitation of
models rather than elaborating a more theoretical approach to their
subject, these handbooks appear to Doty as "particularly ‘vulgar’
and intended for quick reference"(11). The form of most of the
papyrus letters indicates that they “mostly originated in and
reflect the concerns of the lower societal strata, rather than upper
class society as reflected in the literary letters” (Doty 3);
these persons from the lower and middle classes, then, were those to
whom the epistolographic manuals were directed. Malherbe also points
out that the bilingual Bologna Papyrus (third or fourth century A.D.),
apparently a set of exercises composed by a student following an epistolographic
handbook, “witnesses to the modest level of literary culture of
users of some of the handbooks” (10). In short, “most of
these letters are written in the kind of school language used by persons
of average, superficial education, who painfully attempt to write in
an educated manner” (Malherbe 13).
Conclusion
To summarize, ancient instruction in letter-writing appears to resemble
that promulgated by the field of “modern” business communication
in a number of ways. In both cases, such instruction is accorded only
a secondary status in the curriculum. Both kinds of instruction are
highly vocationalized; both attract students who learn by working with
model letters that are laboriously categorized by type, not by assimilating
much theoretical knowledge. Even the most “modern” textbooks
contain many models that students are encouraged to discuss and emulate;
checklists rigidly outlining the features of each letter type complete
the educational method—training which when juxtaposed to ancient
rhetorical training appears not quite as “modem” as apologists
for business communication would lead one to believe. And as I have
showed at length, many of the leading stylistic principles of the ancient
epistolographic tradition are claimed as fundamental maxims for the
field of business communication.
Finally, just as many business communicators today write without the
“benefit” of having a course in business communication,
it appears that to a great degree ancient epistolographic teaching was
largely ignored by most writers, as Welles flatly states in writing
about the composition of the official letter (xlii). Doty agrees that
the influence of the epistolographic handbooks was weak at best: “On
the basis of the few pure examples of the handbook types found in the
papyri, it seems that the guides were not very influential” (10).
Only what the handbooks classified as the letter of introduction is
represented to any great extent in the papyrus letter-collections; “other
types are sparsely represented, but all in all the guidebooks do not
seem to have had much direct influence” (Doty 11).
In a subsequent article, I hope to analyze some of these papyrus letters
in light of the findings of contemporary linguistic pragmatics and discourse
analysis. I will argue that ancient writers of papyrus letters, more
than likely with little if any formal training in “composition,”
produced understandable, useable prose on the basis of their discourse
competence. If this is so, the implications for contemporary business
communication appear clear: instruction in the field should concentrate
on how to help students make the competence with language they already
possess apply explicitly to business communications instead of recapitulating
a 2000-year-old rhetorical tradition that is as little respected now
as it was in the ancient world.6
Iowa State University
Ames, Iowa
NOTES
1Hildebrandt (“Precursor”) does discuss the rhetoric of
Angell Day in the recent Studies in the History ofBusiness Writing (Douglas
and Hildebrandt), and Dickson writes on Erasmus, Vives, Macopedius,
Hegendorff, and other Renaissance rhetoricians in the same anthology.
More recently, Hildebrandt has traced the influence of Greek and Roman
oral rhetorical treatises on medieval and Renaissance letter-writing
manuals (“Influences”).
2See Deissmann passim, Doty 5ff., Stowers 31, White “Body”
10, White “Official Petition” passim. The Oxyrhynchus papyri
and other finds are important not only for their treasure-trove of letters.
Classical and Biblical studies have been immeasurably enriched by the
discovery under the Egyptian sands of important literary finds like
lost portions of Pindar, Menander, and Callimachus and of religious
texts like early copies of parts of the New Testament and the apocryphal
Gospel of Thomas.
3Grube, whose translation of De Elocutione is considered authoritative,
puts the date at “not much later the 270 B.C.” (56). Kennedy
also prefers an earlier date, of c. 350-280 B.C. (Persuasion in Greece
284). For a recent discussion of Demetrius and the plain style in business
communication, see Mendelson.
4 Adaptation.—The style of a letter should be adapted to the person
and the subject. To superiors it should be respectful and deferential;
to inferiors, courteous; to friends, familiar; to relations, affectionate;
to children, simple and playful; on important subjects it should be
forcible and impressive; on lighter subjects, easy and sprightly; in
condolence, tender and sympathetic; in congratulations, lively and joyous”
(Westlake 83).
5 George Douglas appears to agree with that characterization: “It
is one of the popular myths of present teachers of business writing
that the businessman of a hundred years ago was a terrible writer,
that he filled his letters and reports with fustian, cast-iron locutions,
and rodomontade” (125).
6 Preparation of the article was aided by a continuing Research Assignment,
Iowa State University; it was completed during the 1988 Faculty Improvement
Leave. Thanks to my research assistant Alane Fitzgerald and to the Interlibrary
Loan staff at the Parks Library for help in locating and procuring editions
of early business communication textbooks.
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