Brilliant Examples of Really Bad Writing

Posted on | May 3, 2010 | 2 Comments

I just came across some incredible samples of really awful writing that blew my mind. These kinds of failures can often be more instructive than successes.

Naturally, the worst examples come from academia. Still, they do have lessons for writers of business materials and marketing content.

Here are the best of the worst (Or would that be the worst of the worst?):

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

If that is the way this writer talks, he must be a blast at dinner parties.

Here’s another gem:

If such a sublime cyborg would insinuate the future as post-Fordist subject, his palpably masochistic locations as ecstatic agent of the sublime superstate need to be decoded as the “now-all-but-unreadable DNA” of a fast deindustrializing Detroit, just as his Robocop-like strategy of carceral negotiation and street control remains the tirelessly American one of inflicting regeneration through violence upon the racially heteroglossic wilds and others of the inner city.

Perhaps if he moved “Robocop” closer to the beginning of the sentence and got rid of “heteroglossic”, this passage could be salvaged… or not.

It’s so sad. Communication is at the heart of what human beings do. It’s depressing when higher education turns out people with tremendous smarts and the inability to order a cheeseburger without using the word, “entelechy”.

Using big words in rapid succession doesn’t make you smart. It certainly won’t help you sell 99 per cent of all products on Earth. Good writing gets your point across in a way that your target audience will understand immediately.

When in doubt, delete all references to “lugubriousness”. You’ll thank me later.

Comments

2 Responses to “Brilliant Examples of Really Bad Writing”

Derek K. Miller
May 12th, 2010 @ 12:53 pm

I refer you to the term “eumerdification,” a term from Daniel Dennett inspired by Michel Foucault, who said: “in order to be taken seriously by French philosophers, twenty-five percent of what you write has to be impenetrable nonsense.”

http://www.penmachine.com/2010/03/eumerdification-writing-to-impress
Jonathon Narvey
May 12th, 2010 @ 2:44 pm

Ah! So all of these academics have a method to their madness. It all makes sense now.