The research is based on the documents of 1735-1755 from the State Archive of the Volgograd Region and is aimed at revealing pragmatic features of alterations and corrections that are preserved in the drafts of administrative correspondence and texts. Linguistic interpretation of reasons for corrections and selection of a certain variant of the utterance for the written text drafts resulted in distinguishing three types of corrections: factual, stylistic, and communicatively pragmatic. Factual corrections touch upon the content of the document and are explained by necessity to depict the past, present or future events in accordance with the relevance of situation. That is determined by exactness as a major feature of the document. These corrections appear to be text cut-ins of various length which help to clarify or confirm information presented in the document. Stylistic corrections are aimed at improving the style of information delivery and language performance at the lexical, grammatical, textual levels of the document. They are alterations that help to bring the text into compliance with the norms of officialese, exactness, logical and textual coherence; the corrections are provided by lexical insertions or alterations, removing dialectal and common words, restoring direct word order, changing verbal forms, adding discourse units that are to explicate logical relations between syntactic parts when the transformation of oral speech into written is required. Stylistic improvements are presented as the ones that demonstrate intentions of the writer to develop varieties in the genre. Pragmatic alterations communicate the intention to orient the text towards its addressee, to follow the norms of speech etiquette, to simplify the content and its perception, besides, in case of word order correction due to etiquette norms, pruning complicated speech units, adding etiquette clichés and emotionally colored phrases, they contribute to the impact the text is supposed to produce. In conclusion it is stated that reconstruction of the human language history may be viewed through reconstruction of mental-and-speech activity of officialese writers, in particular by discovering such features as language and professional competences, choice of language style, knowledge on correctness and speech norms, that all together reflect the direction in the development of the Russian literary language in the 18 th century.