Excerpt from Dock and Lock Machinery: A Technical Manual
It is a truism, perhaps a platitude, to assert that; the first duty of one who essays the art of public speaking, and thereby invites others to yield attention to his words, is to interest his audience; as apart from such interest the speaker is not likely either to engage the mind or to convince the understanding of a single member of that audience.
It is equally true that the initial duty of one who undertakes any burden of authorship, even in so unpretending a manner as in this monograph, and who thus appeals for the suffrages of a particular (and critical) class of readers, is to make his work readable, is to make it of such sort that it will not only accord with the dictum of Aristotle that "any written composition ought to be easily read," but that it may be perused without boredom or exhaustion of interest.
One who writes and hopes that others will read has a more difficult position to maintain than one who speaks and invites others to hear. The latter can, and if he has in him a vein of humour or a grain of sense does, illumine a dull theme and give colour to a grey monochrome by the introduction of narrative (even though the narrative may not be very relevant), or of allusion. Such aid is forbidden to a technical writer of the present day by an inane though potent authority entitled Convention.
Convention seeks to drag down to the level of its own inanity all the features and departments of modem life and literature, including even such literature as appears in the guise of Engineering publications.
This was not always the case. Some of the treatises and reports which were issued om the studies or the offices of the fathers of modem Engineering were full of interest and even of romance; while in particular cases the quaintness of their restrained humour was irresistible.
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