The Ottoman Empire’s “middle years”—i.e. the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—currently yield the most provocative, new historiographic treatments as scholars seek to debunk theories of decline and stagnation and search for narrative models that rely neither on cataclysmic conquest nor increasing Western dominance for coherence. Still, despite greater attention paid to this period and the gradual awakening of the field as a whole to the problem of defining imperial trajectories according to a rise and fall thesis, most recent work fails to provide a robust alternative. In this paper I will argue that one way out of this difficulty is finally to pay close attention to the shifts in language used by the Ottoman elites themselves as they sought to categorize and administer their realms. As “men of the pen” increasingly replace “men of the sword” as addressees in imperial edicts, a new kind of literacy defines the ambit of Ottoman authority. This literacy corresponds to a shift from the tax register to the register of complaint (?ikayet defterleri) as one of the dominant genres in the imperial archive. Combining the tools and strategies of discourse analysis with the consideration paid by social history to patterns of behavior and slow processes of change, I will explore two documentary genres that heretofore have been read in isolation: treatises written in the style of adab or ahlak as ethical manuals reflecting on the qualities of a just ruler; and various hükümet or orders/judgments issued from the sultan’s divan addressing practical matters of governance and reflecting the increasingly vocal (or increasingly archived) grievances of his subjects. The former, loosely collected under the nasihatname rubric, gradually incorporated the latter in a move away from the characteristic style of advice manuals and toward a sophisticated mode of self-criticism and analysis. The new imperial “literacy”, crafted in response to a Eurasian seventeenth-century crisis, assumed archival knowledge and yet simultaneously broke with traditional genres. By reading these genres in conjuncture, I hope to trace how the discursive strategies of administrative elites shifted from serving merely as labels or categories of imperial domains toward providing the forum for a project of self-fashioning and identity formation.