Zen and the Art of Technical Writing
Anyone who has been in technical communications for any appreciable time, should reread Pirsig’s revolutionary Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. And, if you’ve never read this counter-cultural hit from the 70’s, all the more should you read it now.
Unlike any other book, Pirsig’s epic draws connections between philosophy, the art of writing, the meaningfulness of technology, and our deepest values and understanding of the world. And it does so in a brilliantly told story which is both a personal and a philosophical odyssey, a journey into the meaning of life and how we understand reality.
But it is Pirsig’s concept of “Quality” that speaks most to people whose daily life is spent trying to come up with the best way of presenting information. For Pirsig, Quality is something that underlies all of our cognitive judgments, a kind of mysterious “ground” upon which rests the entire world of perceived objects, people, and events. Despite the mystery of defining exactly what “Quality” is, Pirsig’s underlying argument is actually quite simple -
The Argument
Here is Pirsig’s argument in a nutshell:
1. The “world” out there is actually built up out of our cognitive judgments, i.e. out of the way that we perceive and classify things.
2. There are always competing ways of perceiving, classifying, and understanding the world - thus we are constantly making decisions as to what constitutes reality.
3. The basis for distinguishing between competing ways of understanding something (i.e. between various theories or explanations) is simply that one way seems intuitively “better” than the other.
4. The mysterious thing that determines why we prefer one theory over another is what he calls “Quality” - and it underlies all our judgments, both moral and cognitive.
5. Therefore, the theories that we adopt that condition the way we see the world, i.e. that determine what we take to be “real”, are actually products of Quality and of our drive to find it.
Quality and Technical Writing
What does this have to do with Technical Writing? Well, actually, everything! Pirsig taught English Composition - and the ability to distinguish between good and bad writing is an example of how Quality eventually prevails. The Technical Writer is normally in a position that requires communicating technical information to a wide audience of developers, implementers, or end users. On the surface of things, writers must satisfy two masters - on the one hand, they need to satisfy the Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) who ply them with technical information and whose main concern is that the documents are accurate and technically correct. On the other hand, there are the intended readers who need to both find information quickly and comprehend it. The writer needs to satisfy the demands of the SMEs, usually under time constraints, while making sure that they meet the needs of the readers for whom the document is written in the first place.
Writers whose main concern is making the SME happy run the risk of alienating the reader - while those who mainly worry about giving the reader a great experience in terms of clarity and good looking, easy to read documentation, but who don’t bother to check all the nitty gritty details, run the risk of passing along defective documentation that may someday backfire.
There is a way to beat this conflict, however - the solution is for technical writers to adopt the principle of “Quality” as their overriding value. These writers are going to produce documentation that really does the job - because they are going to find themselves critically reviewing their own work, comparing it with standard work that serves as ideal models for both style and organization, and they are going to keep working on the document until they “feel” that it represents the best document that they can produce given the time they have to produce it. Instead of passively bouncing back and forth between conflicting interests, writers will actively pursue the ideal of Quality and, with that in mind, see that their documentation meets their own standards of what constitutes good technical communication.