Daniel Defoe, one of the pioneers of the English novel, primarily earned his living as a journalist, pamphleteer, proposal writer, and freelance business consultant. A born entrepreneur, Defoe's many projects included promoting and marketing the first practical diving bell, designing commercial fisheries and improving London's sewer system, producing a series of popular self-help manuals, and founding and editing the first English technical writing journal, The Projector. These were the products of Defoe's indefatigable pen, and the utilitarian simplicity of his business and technical writing has strongly influenced English prose ever since. This article will examine two major pieces of Defoe's professional writing: An Essay of Projects, (1698) a portfolio of his best proposals, and the landmark The Complete English Tradesman (1725), the first English business writing manual. These and similar texts would form the loam of Defoe's great novels, Robinson Crusoe (1719), Moll Flanders (1721), and A Journal of a Plague Year (1722). While Defoe's professional writing shaped his creative writing, his gifts as a novelist—his plain, demotic style, his knack for concise narrative and analytical summary, his ability to create convincing personas through textual documentation—shaped his business writing. Both forms of writing made him the premier spokesperson of a new social and economic order.

The results of our recent survey of the membership of the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing, Associated Writing Programs, and the Council of Writing Program Administration indicate the relative health of undergraduate writing programs (major, concentration, or certificate programs, not service courses) in American four-year universities and colleges. During the past five years there has been a significant increase in the number of undergraduate writing programs, including technical and professional writing. But responses to our survey also suggest that while undergraduate technical and professional writing programs comprise the second largest group of programs (behind creative writing) they are not increasing as rapidly as a new kind of undergraduate writing program—a broad-based program that students can complete by taking a wide range of creative writing, composition, journalism, and technical and professional writing courses. The future seems unclear for traditional undergraduate technical and professional writing programs, and faculties need to examine their options in designing or redesigning their programs.

This article collects several examples of technical and creative writing in order to examine whether the differences which have been assumed to exist between the two genres do in fact exist. The formulation of such a dichotomy is traced from I. A. Richards' definition of “poetic vs scientific” writing through C. P. Snow's Two Cultures to Coleridge's Biographia Literaria (Richards' acknowledged source). Coleridge in turn has been shown to be heavily influenced by, in fact to have plagiarized, the work of German idealists, particularly the Schlegels. The German idealists, finally, were working with dichotomies which originate in Cartesian dualism and thus ultimately in the mind/body dichotomy with whose invention Nietzsche credits, or discredits, Plato. The differences and similarities discovered and discussed between the object texts turn out to be governed by Richards' elements of writing—“sense, feeling, tone and intention”—as these elements have been used to dichotomize technical and creative writing. Such previous formulations have attempted to show differences in what Aristotle termed “material cause.” The material causes—the tropes and devices of description—are in fact the same in technical and creative texts. The actual differences and similarities discovered between and among the object texts are, rather, differences governed by Aristotle's “final cause” ( telos).

Technical writing is one kind of creative writing. Using knowledge of facts, audience, and situation, the technical writer recreates reality in a technical report. Concepts of reality and creativity currently operative in philosophy, the physical sciences, cognitive and developmental psychology, history of science, rhetoric, and linguistics provide a theoretical basis for this creative approach to technical writing and confirm that imagining and reasoning are related rather than mutually exclusive thought processes.

Creative and technical writing share definite, but seldom realized, affinities. Like the fiction writer, the engineer and the scientist must realize that writing is a creative process rather than a reflex action if they are to communicate successfully. Often, professional advancement depends on the ability to present and to interpret factual information coherently and effectively. Although technical writing presents factual information and creative writing fictional information, both crafts adhere to the same underlying rhetorical principles in order to create their desired effects. This article examines those shared principles that make technical writing more than a prosaic exercise and allow writers to express themselves meaningfully. The role of imagination in this craft is also explored.