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Business Writing in History: What Caused the Dictamen's Demise?

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Many of the earliest business and administrative letters written in English fol lowed a set of rules called the ars dictaminis, a formal and complex model that prescribed a certain writing style and organization. The necessary pattern of organization was the following: address, salutation, notification, exposition, dispo sition, valediction, and attestation and date. The dictamen almost completely dis appears in the sixteenth century. Did the dictamen disappear suddenly? If so, why? In this paper, I argue that the dictamen disappeared slowly by attrition over the hundred years previous, and further, that it was never universal, as previous scholars have argued. The evidence for the claim that the dictamen was widely used and suddenly disappeared consists mostly of Chancery and government docu ments. When we take into account the mass of business documents involving ordi nary business people, including the largest surviving collection of business docu ments in English before 1500, the Cely papers, we see that by the late fifteenth century, ordinary business people were not following the dictamen's conventions.

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