The road trip didn't hold much interest for me on the first reading and less on each subsequent rereading. I loved 'Lila' the sequel to Zen even more than the original. I was fascinated with Pirsig's philosophy of Quality and the art of rhetoric as a teaching tool to understand Quality. (Always with a capital Q... )
I picked up my now dog-eared copy of 'Zen' one summer after I had started studying copywriting and noticed the enormous similarities between using quality to improve Rhetoric and how it could be used to improve copy.
A large part of the book is devoted to explaining how Quality can be the goal of any undertaking and Pirsig's experience teaching rhetoric at a college in Bozeman. He showed classes despite being unable to define quality they instinctively knew what it was and that it could guide their writing.
Then all of the tools in the traditional rhetoric text books became ways to improve the quality of their writing.
When you substitute 'Selling Power' for 'Quality' and 'copy' for 'rhetoric' it becomes a guide to copywriting.
When we write copy we write to sell. So we aren't reaching for this lofty of goal of quality. We can quantify the quality of our work with response rates. There is no arguing with numbers. Yours pulled 1% mine 1.5%. Mine has more selling power. Therefore, mine is better. It's technically not that simple, there are customer quality and cost of sale considerations etc but none the less hard numbers apply.
So we can usually spot vast improvements in the selling power of different headlines.
"SEX: Now that I have your attention, I can reduce your corns." Vs the Perennial winner from the National Enquirer: "Corns Gone in 30 Days Or Your Money Back"
You can instinctively tell that the one is a stronger headline than the other. There are rules and guidelines in place to help you create headlines with more selling power. That is how you learn to write better copy.
However, this is an underlying philosophy that can be internalised which makes those rules so much more vivid and powerful than just a series of paint by numbers tools.
I picked up my now dog-eared copy of 'Zen' one summer after I had started studying copywriting and noticed the enormous similarities between using quality to improve Rhetoric and how it could be used to improve copy.
A large part of the book is devoted to explaining how Quality can be the goal of any undertaking and Pirsig's experience teaching rhetoric at a college in Bozeman. He showed classes despite being unable to define quality they instinctively knew what it was and that it could guide their writing.
Then all of the tools in the traditional rhetoric text books became ways to improve the quality of their writing.
When you substitute 'Selling Power' for 'Quality' and 'copy' for 'rhetoric' it becomes a guide to copywriting.
When we write copy we write to sell. So we aren't reaching for this lofty of goal of quality. We can quantify the quality of our work with response rates. There is no arguing with numbers. Yours pulled 1% mine 1.5%. Mine has more selling power. Therefore, mine is better. It's technically not that simple, there are customer quality and cost of sale considerations etc but none the less hard numbers apply.
So we can usually spot vast improvements in the selling power of different headlines.
"SEX: Now that I have your attention, I can reduce your corns." Vs the Perennial winner from the National Enquirer: "Corns Gone in 30 Days Or Your Money Back"
You can instinctively tell that the one is a stronger headline than the other. There are rules and guidelines in place to help you create headlines with more selling power. That is how you learn to write better copy.
However, this is an underlying philosophy that can be internalised which makes those rules so much more vivid and powerful than just a series of paint by numbers tools.
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