Cached from http://web.archive.org/web/19990222090512/gopher.tarleton.edu/academics/depts/english/writing.htm
Passages Concerning Writing in Pirsig's Zen and the
Art of Motorcycle Maintenence
chapter 2
While at work I was thinking about this same lack of care in the
digital manuals I was editing. Writing and editing technical manuals is
what I do for a living the other eleven months of the year and I knew
they were full of errors, ambiguities, omissions and information so
completely screwed up you had to read them six times to make any
sense out of them. (24)
chapter 4
I read a sentence or two, wait for him to come up with his usual
barrage of questions, answer them, then read another sentence or two.
Classics read well this way. They must be written this way.
Sometimes we have spent a whole evening reading and talking and
discovered we have only covered two or three pages. It's a form of
reading done a century ago -- when Chautauquas were popular. Unless
you've tried it you can't imagine how pleasant it is to do it this way.
(36)
chapter 6
I don't know his whole story. No one ever will, except Phædrus
himself, and he can no longer speak. But from his writings and from
what others have said and from fragments of my own recall it should
be possible to piece together some kind of approximation of what he
was talking about. Since the basic ideas for this Chautauqua were
taken from him there will be no real deviation, only an enlargement
that may make the Chautauqua more understandable than if it were
presented in a purely abstract way. (60)
There seems little doubt that he was insane, but much of his writing at
the time indicates that what was driving him insane was this hostile
opinion of him. Unusual behavior tends to produce estrangement in
others which tends to further the unusual behavior and thus the
estrangement in self-stoking cycles until some sort of climax is
reached. In Phædrus' case there was a court-ordered police arrest and
permanent removal from society. (62)
Part II
chapter 9
For this you keep a lab notebook. Everything gets written down,
formally, so that you know at all times where you are, where you've
been, where you're going and where you want to get. In scientific
work and electronics technology this is necessary because otherwise
the problems get so complex you get lost in them and confused and
forget what you know and what you don't know and have to give up.
In cycle maintenance things are not that involved, but when confusion
starts it's a good idea to hold it down by making everything formal
and exact. Sometimes just the act of writing down the problems
straightens out your head as to what they really are (93)
chapter 10
He had noticed again and again in his lab work that what might seem
to be the hardest part of scientific work, thinking up the hypotheses,
was invariably the easiest. The act of formally writing everything
down precisely and clearly seemed to suggest them. (100)
chapter 11
His letters from Korea are radically different from his earlier writing,
indicating this same turning point. They just explode with emotion. He
writes page after page about tiny details of things he sees:
marketplaces, shops with sliding glass doors, slate roofs, roads,
thatched huts, everything. Sometimes full of wild enthusiasm,
sometimes depressed, sometimes angry, sometimes even humorous, he
is like someone or some creature that has found an exit from a cage
he did not even know was around him, and is wildly roaming over the
countryside visually devouring everything in sight. (107)
He comments on how amazing it is that everything in the universe can
e described by the twenty-six written characters with which they have
been working. (107)
chapter 12
They wonder what an engineering writer like myself would have in
common with an abstract painter and I have to say again that I don't
know. I mentally file through the fragments for an answer but none
comes. (122)
`I've wondered too,'' Phædrus had said, and in a puzzled voice had
added, ``I think maybe it's because every teacher tends to grade up
students who resemble him the most. If your own writing shows neat
penmanship you regard that more important in a student than if it
doesn't. If you use big words you're going to like students who write
with big words.'' (123)
He returned to his Midwest, picked up a practical degree in
journalism, married, lived in Nevada and Mexico, did odd jobs,
worked as a journalist, a science writer and an industrial-advertising
writer. (127)
chapter 14
After dinner Jack and Wylla Barsness arrive. More living images.
Jack is recorded in the tomb fragments as a good person who writes
and teaches English at the college. (144)
I seem to remember now he was a fiction writer mainly, who taught
English, rather than a systematic scholar who taught English. There
was a continuing split in the department along these lines which in
part gave rise to, or at least accelerated the growth of, Phædrus' wild
set of ideas which no one else had ever heard of, and Jack was
supportive of Phædrus because, although he wasn't sure he knew what
Phædrus was talking about, he saw it was something a fiction writer
could work with better than linguistic analysis. It's an old split. Like
the one between art and art history. One does it and the other talks
about how it's done and the talk about how it's done never seems to
match how one does it. (144)
DeWeese brings over some instructions for assembly of an outdoor
barbecue rotisserie which he wants me to evaluate as a professional
technical writer. (145)
He's unable to comprehend things when they appear in the ugly,
chopped-up, grotesque sentence style common to engineering and
technical writing. (145)
``What I wanted to say,'' I finally get in, ``is that I've a set of
instructions at home which open up great realms for the improvement
of technical writing. They begin, `Assembly of Japanese bicycle
require great peace of mind.' '' (145-6)
``It's the format,'' I say. ``No writer can buck it. Technology
presumes there's just one right way to do things and there never is.
(147)
``You should write all this down,'' Gennie says. (153)
chapter 15
The subject he'd been brought here to teach was rhetoric, writing, the
second of the three R's. He was to teach some advanced courses in
technical writing and some sections of freshman English. (155)
What you're supposed to do in most freshman-rhetoric courses is to
read a little essay or short story, discuss how the writer has done
certain little things to achieve certain little effects, and then have the
students write an imitative little essay or short story to see if they can
do the same little things. He tried this over and over again but it never
jelled. The students seldom achieved anything, as a result of this
calculated mimicry, that was remotely close to the models he'd given
them. More often their writing got worse. It seemed as though every
rule he honestly tried to discover with them and learn with them was
so full of exceptions and contradictions and qualifications and
confusions that he wished he'd never come across the rule in the first
place. (156)
And what he really thought was that the rule was pasted on to the
writing after the writing was all done. It was post hoc, after the fact,
instead of prior to the fact. And he became convinced that all the
writers the students were supposed to mimic wrote without rules,
putting down whatever sounded right, then going back to see if it still
sounded right and changing it if it didn't. There were some who
apparently wrote with calculating premeditation because that's the way
their product looked. But that seemed to him to be a very poor way to
look. It had a certain syrup, as Gertrude Stein once said, but it didn't
pour. But how're you to teach something that isn't premeditated? It
was a seemingly impossible requirement. He just took the text and
commented on it in an unpremeditated way and hoped the students
would get something from that. It wasn't satisfactory. (156)
chapter 15
He just felt that no writer ever learned to write by this squarish,
by-the-numbers, objective, methodical approach. Yet that was all
rationality offered and there was nothing to do about it without being
irrational And if there was one thing he had a clear mandate to do in
this Church of Reason it was to be rational, so he had to let it go at
that. (162)
No one could remember all that stuff and concentrate on what he was
trying to write about. It was all table manners, not derived from any
sense of kindness or decency or humanity, but originally from an
egotistic desire to look like gentlemen and ladies. Gentlemen and
ladies had good table manners and spoke and wrote grammatically. It
was what identified one with the upper classes. (162)
Three hours of sleep and he was so tired he knew he wouldn't be up
to giving a lecture that day, and besides, his notes had never been
completed, so he wrote on the blackboard: ``Write a 350-word essay
answering the question, What is quality in thought and statement?''
Then he sat by the radiator while they wrote and thought about quality
himself. (163)
Part III
chapter 16
One of them, a girl with strong-lensed glasses, wanted to write a
five-hundred-word essay about the United States. He was used to the
sinking feeling that comes from statements like this, and suggested
without disparagement that she narrow it down to just Bozeman. (170)
She came in the next class with a puzzled look and handed him a
five-thousand-word essay on the front of the Opera House on the main
street of Bozeman, Montana. ``I sat in the hamburger stand across the
street,'' she said, ``and started writing about the first brick, and the
second brick, and then by the third brick it all started to come and I
couldn't stop. They thought I was crazy, and they kept kidding me,
but here it all is. I don't understand it.'' (171)
She was blocked because she was trying to repeat, in her writing,
things she had already heard, just as on the first day he had tried to
repeat things he had already decided to say. She couldn't think of
anything to write about Bozeman because she couldn't recall anything
she had heard worth repeating. She was strangely unaware that she
could look and see freshly for herself, as she wrote, without primary
regard for what had been said before. The narrowing down to one
brick destroyed the blockage because it was so obvious she had to do
some original and direct seeing. (171)
He experimented further. In one class he had everyone write all hour
about the back of his thumb. Everyone gave him funny looks at the
beginning of the hour, but everyone did it, and there wasn't a single
complaint about ``nothing to say.'' (171-2)
In another class he changed the subject from the thumb to a coin, and
got a full hour's writing from every student. In other classes it was the
same. Some asked, ``Do you have to write about both sides?'' Once
they got into the idea of seeing directly for themselves they also saw
there was no limit to the amount they could say. It was a
confidence-building assignment too, because what they wrote, even
though seemingly trivial, was nevertheless their own thing, not a
mimicking of someone else's. (172)
During the next quarter, when teaching ``persuasive writing,'' he
chose this topic [eliminating the grade-and-degree system] as a
``demonstrator,'' a piece of persuasive writing he worked up by
himself, day by day, in front of and with the help of the class. (172)
He felt that by exposing classes to his own sentences as he made
them, with all the misgivings and hang-ups and erasures, he would
give a more honest picture of what writing was like than by spending
class time picking nits in completed student work or holding up the
completed work of masters for emulation. (173)
At the end of the quarter the students were asked to write an essay
evaluating the system. None of them knew at the time of writing what
his or her grade would be. Fifty-four percent opposed it. Thirty-seven
percent favored it. Nine percent were neutral. (178)
What was Phædrus trying to do, anyway? This question became more
and more imperative as he went on. The answer that had seemed right
when he started now made less and less sense. He had wanted his
students to become creative by deciding for themselves what was good
writing instead of asking him all the time. The real purpose of
withholding the grades was to force them to look within themselves,
the only place they would ever get a really right answer. (179)
chapter 17
The student was finally and completely trapped into making quality
judgments for himself. And it was just exactly this and nothing else
that taught him to write. (187)
By reversing a basic rule that all things which are to be taught must
first be defined, he had found a way out of all this. He was pointing
to no principle, no rule of good writing, no theory...but he was
pointing to something, nevertheless, that was very real, whose reality
they couldn't deny. The vacuum that had been created by the
withholding of grades was suddenly filled with the positive goal of
Quality, and the whole thing fit together. Students, astonished, came
by his office and said, ``I used to just hate English. Now I spend more
time on it than anything else.'' Not just one or two. Many. The whole
Quality concept was beautiful. It worked. It was that mysterious,
individual, internal goal of each creative person, on the blackboard at
last. (187)
chapter 18
He wrote: ``(1) Every instructor of English composition knows what
quality is. (Any instructor who does not should keep this fact carefully
concealed, for this would certainly constitute proof of incompetence.)
(2) Any instructor who thinks quality of writing can and should be
defined before teaching it can and should go ahead and define it. (3)
All those who feel that quality of writing does exist but cannot be
defined, but that quality should be taught anyway, can benefit by the
following method of teaching pure quality in writing without defining
it.'' (191)
chapter 24
Then I see him write, ``Dear Mom:'' Then he stares at the paper for a
while. Then he looks up. ``What should I say?''
I start to grin. I should have him write for an hour about one
side of a coin. I've sometimes thought of him as a student but not as a
rhetoric student. (249)
Part IV
chapter 28
His second hypothesis was that the Chairman was a ``technician,'' a
phrase he used for a writer so deeply involved in his field that he'd
lost the ability to communicate with people outside. (306-07)
chapter 29
And rhetoric. Poor rhetoric, once ``learning'' itself, now becomes
reduced to the teaching of mannerisms and forms, Aristotelian forms,
for writing, as if these mattered. Five spelling errors, Phædrus
remembered, or one error of sentence completeness, or three
misplaced modifiers, or -- it went on and on. Any of these was
sufficient to inform a student that he did not know rhetoric. (344)
We'll learn the Truth in our other academic courses, and then learn a
little rhetoric so that we can write it nicely and impress our bosses
who will advance us to higher positions.
Forms and mannerisms...hated by the best, loved by the
worst. Year after year, decade after decade of little front-row
``readers,'' mimics with pretty smiles and neat pens, out to get their
Aristotelian A's while those who possess the real aretê sit silently in
back of them wondering what is wrong with themselves that they
cannot like this subject. (344)
chapter 30
``And what is written well and what is written badly...need we ask
Lysias or any other poet or orator who ever wrote or will write either
a political or other work, in meter or out of meter, poet or prose
writer, to teach us this?''
What is good, Phædrus, and what is not good...need we ask
anyone to tell us these things? (357)