by Kathleen Sanchez

More and more academic disciplines have begun to recognize the important roles that women have played in their histories, and technical communication is no exception. To better understand what we know about the history of women and technical writing, Dr. Kathryn Raign, associate professor in the Department of Technical Communication at UNT, analyzed the preserved writings of people in ancient Mesopotamia, specifically those authored by women. The study appears in the Journal of Technical Writing and Communication.

In her article, Dr. Raign disputes the currently held belief that the first technical documents by women appeared in the fifteenth century. Her study shows that technical communication existed in one of the earliest civilizations, as early as 2400 BCE, and that women were important contributors to the field.

The members of Mesopotamian society had different levels of literacy. Therefore, trained writers needed to write in a way that everyone could read and understand. Dr. Raign's study found that the women who could write fulfilled roles as technical writers and created legal documents, records, procedures, poems, and letters. They conducted their own business and facilitated transactions between people, and they wrote for medical purposes and funeral rituals.

For her study, Dr. Raign classified the pieces of text she analyzed as technical based on whether the purpose of the text met one of three criteria: "to accomplish something, provide instruction, or to make the tacit explicit" (p. 346). In her analysis, she identified the techniques that women writers employed as evidence that they were skilled writers and specialized in creating technical documents. We still consider these techniques best practices for effective written communication today. For example, they used active voice, strong verbs, imperative mood in step-by-step instructions, and rhetorical strategies to persuade their readers or motivate them to act.

Ancient Mesopotamian technical writers recognized the value of the written word and the need to make technical information clear and understandable for others. Even at that time, people wrote for many of the same reasons and used similar techniques as modern technical writers. Dr. Raign's article establishes the texts in her study as evidence of the origin of technical communication and acknowledges "the significant role women played" (p. 362). She advocates for investigations into other times in history where the accomplishments of women writers may have been overlooked.

To read Dr. Raign's full study, click here. For updates on the department, follow the UNT Department of Technical Communication on Facebook and Instagram.