The Art of Ancient Mesopotamian Technical Manuals and Letters: The Origins of Instructional Writing

Abstract

The people of the Ancient Near East, inventors of writing, fully understood that providing instructions was a highly persuasive and reader-centric act that required the writer to make specific choices – the same choices that we still make today. In fact, when we write instructions and teach others to write instructions, we are practicing principles developed by the Mesopotamians. In this paper, I analyze excerpts from a technical manual and two letters to make my argument.

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