This article is a bibliographical essay on the history of business and technical writing based on a survey of over 200 articles and books that demonstrate not only the quality and quantity of recent publications in this field but also the wide opportunities it offers for future research. The studies in the article and bibliography are grouped into 13 categories according to historical period (from ancient and classical times through the twentieth century), national origin, and (for twentieth-century studies) subject of investigation. The article concludes with suggestions about further research in the history of business and technical writing.

This article first describes the NCR-USC Document Validation Laboratory, its corporate background, the mutual benefits it offers to National Cash Register (NCR) and the University of South Carolina (USC), and the validation procedure used therein. The article then goes on to discuss three common problems discovered in NCR's manuals and the reasons for these problems. The laboratory's success is then illustrated by presenting and analyzing excerpts from two documents that were validated in the laboratory and subsequently revised by NCR's writers before being revalidated.