Post on 12-Jun-2020
transcript
Anthony Di Renzo 1
PLAIN DEALING: DANIEL DEFOE, BENJAMIN FRANKLIN AND THE ROOTS
OF MODERN BUSINESS PROSE ♦
hen my wife announced she wanted a Franklin Day Planner for our fifth
anniversary, I was nonplussed. I had wanted to buy her something more
romantic. However, I acquiesced, mostly for scholarly reasons. As a
professional writing instructor, I am fascinated by the history and development of American
business prose, and browsing at Franklin Quest, an office
supply chain founded on the principles and writings of
Benjamin Franklin, seemed like perfect research for this
article. I would not be disappointed.
W
Even before I entered the store in the Syracuse
Carousel Center, I was greeted by a recording of a glass
armonica, Franklin’s musical invention, playing a Mozart
sonata. That eighteenth century atmosphere continued inside.
The showroom, all right angles and clean lines, was as
austerely elegant as a Georgian anteroom. Prints of Hogarths
and Palladian architecture adorned the walls, and crisply
dressed sales clerks paced amid displays of binders, brief cases, stationery, and books. Despite
their mincing decorum, however, their speech remained very American: brisk, forthright, direct.
Intrigued by the store's layout and design, I began studying the planners themselves.
Scientifically organized along the time management principles found in Franklin’s
Autobiography (1791), these ledgers also contain inspirational quotations and spaces for
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reflective journal entries. One model, the Monticello, whose pages come with “blue marble
design on bright white paper complimented with a gold accent,” features excerpts from 18th-
century English writers and poets, including Daniel Defoe (Catalogue 63). Something seemed
oddly appropriate about Franklin Quest's unusual marketing technique, for despite its ersatz
approach to history, the company, which preaches effective business communication, was
honoring the 18th-century English roots of American business prose.
hough often considered a product of modern capitalism, American business writing actually
developed from the epistolary style of the early English Enlightenment. As Marshall
McLuhan has noted, Augustan London was the world's first consumer and mass media culture,
and it simultaneously gave us the novel and the business letter. For the first time ever, writers
could support themselves solely by writing.
T
Unfortunately, even geniuses spent most of their time hacking: Swift was secretary to Sir
William Temple; Smollet produced health pamphlets; Johnson wrote advertising. Even Pope’s
Homer was the result of an extensive direct mail campaign.
Meeting strict deadlines and communicating to a wide audience
forced these writers to pare their prose. In fact, 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. Its origins, however, lie not in business but in
science and religion. During the Restoration, the Royal Science
Academy and the Puritan Church for different reasons argued that
simple and direct writing should be the norm of English society—
the former to stress rationality and objectivity, the latter to stress
honesty and utility. Ironically, the Plain Style became a common dialect in a world split along
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class and religious lines, one in which both parties, High Church aristocrats and Low Church
merchants, sought to exploit each other in a cruel and volatile market.
To survive in such a money-mad society, 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. For example, Samuel Richardson's epistolary
novels, Pamela and Clarissa, are modelled after the letter writing manuals he wrote and
produced in his own print shop. No writer, however, was more enterprising than Daniel Defoe,
often called the father of the Plain Style and the English novel. As merchant, chapman, amateur
scientist, and dissenter, Defoe valued plain speaking in his
personal and business affairs, and practiced it in his fiction
and journalism. According to Ian Watt, Defoe was “the
optimistic spokesman of the new economic and social order”
(89). Isaac Kramnick goes so far as to call him “capitalism’s
first great apologist” (192).
Unlike his fellow Puritan, John Bunyan, Defoe
relished Vanity Fair. Indeed, this subversive opportunist
religiously played the early literary market for his own ends.
Many critics have commented on how Defoe in Robinson
Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1722) transforms the discourse of Puritan confessional
literature into English's first how-to-succeed-in-business stories. Few critics, however, have
noticed the elaborate business documentation that shapes these novels. The marooned Robinson
Crusoe is a one-man corporation, and his journal contains proposals and progress reports to
himself as he struggles to make his island more productive. As a novel, Moll Flanders often
reads like a packet of bills, writs, and brochures, such as the pamphlet discussing the different
price ranges available at a lying-in-hospital in Drury Lane.
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As a prolific pamphleteer (he wrote over 500 tracts), Defoe often produced these kinds of
promotional and informative circulars. Most of these remain uncollected. Some, however, are
still in print and are among the most important early business documents in English. An Essay
Upon Projects (1699), for example, is “an astonishing compendium of proposed radical
reforms,” “a blueprint for a young capitalist society,” which includes such “daring” schemes as
"the establishing of a general bank, income tax and a roving commission to check evasion, the
direction of labour, the building of national highways,” and, significantly, “an academy for the
correction and refinement of the English tongue” (Burgess 10).
Defoe, however, had already taken steps to purify the language of the capitalist tribe in
his seminal pamphlet The Complete English Tradesman (1726), England’s first business writing
manual. Even after 270 years, Defoe’s tract remains fresh and contemporary because its thesis
still applies: “A tradesman’s letter should be plain, concise, and to the purpose. No quaint
expressions, no book-phrases, no flourishes. And yet they must be full and sufficient to express
what he means, so as not to be doubtful, much less unintelligible” (145). As in his fiction, Defoe
in this business manual adapts the rhetoric of Puritan devotional manuals for economic ends,
tempering sardonic humor with scientific severity. His section on cover letters reads like a
parody of the Prodigal Son. Defoe humorously contrasts two writers, an affected coxcomb and a
plain-dealing journeyman. Here is the first letter: Sir—The destinies having so appointed it, and my dark stars concurring, that I, who by
nature was framed for better things, should be put out to trade, and the gods having been
so propitious to me in the time of my servitude, that at length . . . I am launched forth into
the great ocean of business [and] I thought it fit to acquaint you . . . and hereby let you
know that I shall have occasion for the goods hereafter mentioned, which you shall send
me by the carrier. (144)
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This young man, Defoe gibes, “should turn poet instead of tradesman, and set up for wit,
not a shopkeeper” (144). Compare this bombast to the second letter:
BEING OBLIGED, SIR, by my late master’s decease, to enter immediately upon his
business, and consequently open my shop without coming up to London to furnish myself
with such goods as I presently want, I have here sent you a small order as underwritten. I
hope you will think yourself obliged to use me well, and particularly that the goods may
be in fine condition, though I cannot be at London to examine them myself. (145)
“This,” says Defoe, “was writing like a man that understood what he was doing; and his
correspondent in London would presently say—‘This young man writes like a man of business;
pray let us take care to use him well, for in all probability he will be a good chapman.’”
Here endeth the lesson. Go and do likewise.
Defoe was evangelical about effective communication in the marketplace, since this skill
had allowed him to triumph over England's rigid caste system to become a successful tradesman.
“The end of speech,” he declared, “is that men might understand one another’s meaning; . . . If
any man were to ask me, which would supposed to be a perfect style, or language, I would
answer, that in which a man speaking to five hundred people, of all common and various
capacities, idiots or lunatics excepted, should be understood by them all in the same manner with
one another, and in the same sense in which the speaker intended to be understood” (149).
His sermon on business writing stresses four points: an awareness of one's audience; a
plain, easy style; scientific accuracy; and personal integrity. With these tools, a man could write
himself out of poverty.
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efoe’s Gospel of Success changed the life of many young men seeking their fortune in
London at the time. One of them was an American printer's apprentice named Benjamin
Franklin, then in his late teens, who was working at Watt’s Printing House. Young Ben was
stranded in London between 1724 and 1726, after being sent there on a wild goose chase by the
Governor of Pennsylvania. While struggling to earn enough money for his return fare, Franklin
took to the streets of London the way privileged young men took to Cambridge, befriending
Bernard Mandleville, the author of The Fable of The Bees (1724), and attempting to arrange an
interview with Sir Isaac Newton.
D
Prior to his stay in London, Franklin was the unambitious son of a Boston candlemaker
who had fled to Philadelphia to avoid working for his tyrannical printer brother, William. But
London’s coffee houses, print shops, and book stores fired his imagination, and his discovery of
Defoe's tracts and novels marked the turning point in Franklin’s creative life. Franklin's gift for
political satire, his passion for practical science, his strategic interest in juntos (those associations
of freewheeling leather-aprons who would meet to
trade information) were all inspired by Defoe. One
could almost say that if Benjamin Franklin had never
been born, Daniel Defoe would have been forced to
invent him—the Self-Made Man in the New World.
Appropriately, when Franklin establishing his
printing house in Philadelphia, he honored his master
by bringing out American editions of Defoe’s work.
To be sure, there are important differences
between Defoe and Franklin’s attitude toward
business writing. As Max Weber observed, “what in
the former case was an expression of commercial
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daring and a personal inclination morally neutral, in the latter takes on the character of an
ethically colored maxim for the conduct of life” (27). If Defoe is the entrepreneur as artist,
bending the rhetoric of religion to suit the needs of the market, Franklin is the entrepreneur as
philosopher, bending the rhetoric of the market to suit the needs of religion. As business writers,
both men cultivated a shrewd and pragmatic style, but Defoe's was better suited for a cynical,
cosmopolitan city that was rich in resources and opportunities. Franklin’s style, homey, pious
could only have evolved in a remote Quaker colony. “In the backwoods small bourgeois
circumstances of Pennsylvania,” Weber explains, “where business threatened for simple lack of
money to fall back into barter, where there was hardly a sign of large enterprise, where only the
earliest beginnings of banking were to be found, [honest business practice] was considered the
essence of moral conduct, even commanded in the name of duty” (29).
Nevertheless, Defoe’s stylistic influence is blatant
in Franklin’s scientific and economic tracts, his self-help
articles, and his Autobiography, which together form the
fountainhead of American business prose. Given the two
men’s common religious and class heritage, this influence
should not be surprising. Like Defoe, Franklin was of
Dissenter, shopkeeper’s stock. As Franklin scholar
Kenneth Silverman has observed, the Autobiography
itself is written "in a Neoclassical version of the Puritan
plain style, without formal beauty or pretensions to
emotional force" (ix). As a matter of fact, Franklin’s
famous time management spreadsheet, the prototype of
the Franklin Day Planner, was created to measure his
moral rather than his financial account, though Franklin
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ecall Defoe’s four criteria for good business writing: an awareness of one's audience; a
style. During the French and Indian Wars,
Whereas, 150 wagons, with 4 horses to each wagon, and 1,500 saddles or pack horses
often insisted one was related to the other, hence the unusual quality of his business anecdotes,
which read like Biblical parables. We have already seen the same general technique in Defoe’s
The Complete English Tradesman, but Franklin even imitates the specifics of Defoe’s manual.
plain, easy style; scientific accuracy; personal integrity. I would like to illustrate these
points by reading examples from Franklin’s work.
The first example illustrates audience and
R
Franklin served as an aide to General Braddock. Low on horses, the General wanted to
confiscate them from Pennsylvania farmers because he had no time to barter. Instead, Franklin
urged they advertise in a Lancaster paper. Here is the ad he wrote:
are wanted for the service of His Majesty’s forces, now about to rendezvous at Will's
Creek, and His Excellency, General Braddock, having been pleased to empower me to
contract for hire of the same; I hereby give notice that I shall attend for that purpose at
Lancaster from this day to Wednesday evening, . . . where I shall be ready to agree for
wagons or teams, or single horses on the following terms:
1. That there shall be paid for each wagon with 4 good horses and a driver, fifteen
shillings per diem. And for each able horse with a pack-saddle or other saddle . . . ,
two shillings per diem. And for each able horse without a saddle, eighteen pence per
diem.
2. e pay commence from the time of their joining forces at Will's Creek . . . That th
[until] after their discharge. (147)
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’s horse-trading transformed a potentially alienating situation into an occasion for
s scientific papers were
A FIRE THEN BEING MADE in any Chimney, the Air over the Fire is rarified by the Heat,
Franklin
colonial solidarity, at no small profit to the Pennsylvania farmers.
The second example illustrates scientific accuracy. Franklin'
written more for the market than the academy and read more like sales proposals than treatises.
Notice how Franklin makes the Franklin stove appealing to a skeptical and tightfisted audience.
First he explains how the product works in understandable language:
becom immediately rises in the Funnel, and goes out; the other Air e lighter and therefore
in the Room flowing towards the Chimney supplies its Place, is rarified in its turn, and
rises likewise; the Place of the Air thus carried out of the Room is Supplied by fresh Air
coming in thro' Doors and Windows, or, if they be shut, thro' every Crevice with
Violence, as may be seen by a holding a Candle to a Key-hole. (240-41)
Next Franklin explains the product’s benefits:
[The] advantages of [this Fire-place] above the common Fire-place are:
1. That your whole Room is equally warmed; so that People need not crowd so close round
the Fire, but may sit near the Window, and have the Benefit of the Light for Reading,
Writing, Needlework, &c. . . .
2. If you sit near the Fire, you have not that cold Draught of uncomfortable Air nipping your
Back and Heels, as when before common Fires, by which many catch cold, being scorcht
before, and, as it were, froze behind. (241)
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No wonder Hearth and Home and Vermont Casting have modelled their own fireplace
manuals after Franklin’s!
The last example, the most touching, illustrates personal integrity. Franklin in this public
service announcement uses the death of his younger son to defend inoculation:
Understanding ‘tis a current Report that my son
Francis, who died lately of the Small Pox, had it by
Inoculation; and being desired to satisfy the Public
in that Particular; inasmuch as some People are, by
that Report . . . deterred from having that Operation
performed on their children, I do hereby sincerely
declare, that he was not inoculated, but received the
Distemper in the common Way of Infection: And I
suppose the Report could only arise from its being
my known Opinion, that Inoculation was a safe and
beneficial Practice; and from my having said among my Acquaintance, that I intended to have my
Child inoculated, as soon as he should have recovered sufficient Strength from a Flux from which
he had been long afflicted. (284)
In his Autobiography, Franklin would add “This I mention for the sake of parents who omit that
operation on the supposition that they should never forgive themselves if a child died under it—
my example showing that the regret may be the same either way, and that therefore the safer
should be chosen" (112)
If these examples have a strikingly contemporary ring, it is because the rhetoric and ethos of
18th century English mercantile culture still influences business writing today even in an age
Di Renzo, “Plain Dealing” 11
of faxes, modems, and multinationals. Indeed, the Plain Style, as practiced by Defoe and
Franklin, is often cited as an ideal, even a moral imperative, in professional communications.
Think of the Plain English Revolution launched in the early Eighties by Alan Siegel of Siegel
and Gale, a New York consulting firm dedicated to simplifying language in business,
government, and law. According to Siegel, “Redressing the balance—making sure that the
documents consumers are expected to understand are made understandable—is a matter of
simple fairness, and simple efficiency”; in other words, of plain dealing (99).
However laudable this goal, we should remind ourselves that plain dealing does not mean
returning language to a natural simplicity but using a sophisticated rhetorical tradition, the
Puritan Plain style tempered by Neoclassical scientism, which
has a specific history and ideology. When we write a circular
explaining the hazards of NYSEG pipelines, a sales letter asking
for contributions to Loaves and Fishes, a memo outlining a
change in policy at Corning, no matter how clear and
straightforward our language, we are not being natural but
politic. As Anthony Burgess notes about Daniel Defoe’s
deceptively simple style, “The art is too much concealed by art
to seem like art, and hence the art is frequently discounted” (7), adding that simplicity “[can]
only be assumed by . . . sophisticated [writers] with long years of writing behind [them]” (17).
The same observation applies to Benjamin Franklin, whose self-effacing persona hides,
to quote Herman Melville, “deep worldly wisdom and polished Italian tact, gleaming under an
air Arcadian unaffectedness” (qtd in Silverman xx). Such simplicity, though, is an illusion. From
Grub Street to Walnut Street, from Walnut Street to Wall Street, Plain English always has been
about selling, not informing. And if you don’t believe me, just visit Franklin Quest at the
Syracuse Carousel Mall. Their planners come in black, burgundy, and forest green.
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WORKS CITED Burgess, Anthony. “Introduction” A Journal of the Plague Year. By Daniel Defoe. (NY:
Penguin, 1966) 6-19.
Defoe, Daniel. “Excerpt from The Complete English Tradesman.” Writing About Business
and Industry. Ed. Beverly E. Schneller. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995) 144-49.
Franklin, Benjamin. The Autobiography and Other Writings. Selected and Edited with an
Introduction by L. Jesse Lemisch. (NY: Signet, 1960)
Franklin Quest. “Fall 1995 Catalogue.” (Franklin Covey, 1995)
Kramnick, Isaac. Bolingbroke and His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of
Walpole. (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1968)
Silverman, Kenneth. “Introduction.” The Autobiography and Other Writings. By Benjamin
Franklin. Edited by Silverman. (NY: Penguin, 1986) vii-xx.
Siegel, Alan. “The Plain English Revolution.” Strategies for Business and Technical
Writing. Ed. Kevin J. Harty. 3rd ed. (NY: Harcourt, 1989)
Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. (Berkeley: U of
California P, 1957)
Weber, Max. “Excerpt from The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.” Writing
About Business and Industry. Ed. Schneller. 26-30.