(This is part 4 of my series on Zipf’s Law and literary style. Please see the last part, a disclaimer here) Puritan Style, Puritan Nature With my methodology thoroughly discussed, my first case study will be the effect of Puritan “plain style” as derived from (in my account) Ramist logic on the Zipfian structure of their writings. This puritan “plain style” though much discussed has no universal definition. The term itself does a decent job explaining the relevant aspects of this linguistic practice. Puritan writers would have been expected to eschew the metaphysical exhortations common to Anglican or Catholic writers in favor of more straightforward explications of the doctrines and usages embodied in God’s world.   Though Perry Miller notes that “considerable freedom was possible” in the actual process of writing, he also points out that the expectation of a simple style extended through all aspects of Puritan discourse. 1 Miller argues that this stricture was pervasive enough to devalue the concept of genre, leading to a literary field where “the authors of that [non-sermon] literature, who in most cases were divines, did not conceive of themselves as writing in literary genres.” 2 Indeed, literary genre took a back seat to the means and usages derived from the predominantly Ramist intellectual context that supported these Puritan writers. Ramism, a simplification of Aristotle’s system of logic promulgated by Petrus Ramus in the mid 1500s, aimed to expunge the rhetorical flourishes and (perhaps overly) intricate lines of theological thought common to the Scholastic writings that had long maintained dominance in the European universities. In order to do so, Ramus argued that his logically system had been embedded in our world through the mandate of God. By continually asserting God as a universally beneficial teleology (that is, there is no chance of him acting […]