Chaucer's 'A Treatise on the Astrolabe': a 600-year-old model for humanizing technical documents

Chaucer's 'A Treatise on the Astrolabe' despite its medieval roots, still serves as a model for incorporating coherent organization, appropriate content, accurate and precise descriptions, personable tone, effective metadiscourse, and varied sentence structure and length in modern technical writing. This article explores how Chaucer merged his logico-rational self (as exhibited in the work's deliberate organization and thorough content) with his humanistic self (as shown in his simple style and personable tone). This is shown to be an effective technique for humanizing and strengthening a technical document. By following the lessons learned from Treatise, modern technical writers can minimize the semantic and psychological noise of a document, while maximizing the accurate and comfortable transmission of its content.<
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