Narrative traffic

Narrative traffic: Traffic consisting of plain or encrypted messages written in a natural language and transmitted in accordance with standard formats and procedures.

Note: Examples of narrative traffic include (a) messages that are placed on paper tape and transmitted via a teletypewriter (TTY), and on reception, are converted back to a printed page on another teletypewriter or teleprinter and (b) messages printed on a sheet of paper, transmitted via optical character recognition (OCR) equipment, and on reception, converted back to a printed page on a printer.

Source: from Federal Standard 1037C and from MIL-STD-188