In Defense of Bad Writing

The longest job I've ever held is being a writing teacher. Over a decade in. I think that context matters when I say: I love bad writing. It's the raw stuff of language: the goopy mass of liquid feelings, hardening attitudes, pulsating notions and oozing arguments. It's a glimpse into someone else's interiority, and bad writing is especially useful for this, because it eschews the traditional markers of 'good' writing, which, while good for efficient communication, also strips the writing of something essentially unique about this particular combination of characters.

Bad writing is something special.

Grinding off Those Rough Edges

Getting good at writing happens in two phases. The first phase we can call standardization. This involves learning to suppress your own voice by cloaking it in the accessories of corpo-speak, academia or professionalization in some way. That process strips away a lot of what's individualistic about how you write. The second phase, reintegration, requires that you know and can deploy all those rules and standard practices. Now, within that framework, how do you implement them while still retaining your voice? How do you reintegrate yourself into a form that was designed to sand you down?

A lot of people never get to the second phase. They learn to suppress. They never reintegrate.

Bad writing exists before standardization. Before the voice gets smoothed out. Before the rough edges disappear. And I love it for exactly that reason.

Bad writing can produce some incredibly interesting effects which allow us to understand ourselves and others more viscerally and intimately. My favorite example: extremely homoerotic anti-gay Christian propaganda.

For example, in 2010, the American Family Association (AFA) claimed that gay military service members would be recruiting in the barracks showers, so you better watch out! The lurid descriptions of what happens in barracks showers seemed perhaps to give a bit of a thrill to the button-down authors of the warning.

Or, take one of my favorite online crazies, Bob Hickman, author of books like God Entered into My Body Like a Body My Same Size. Bob has a number of screeds decrying the evils of homosexuality, while also describing in sensual details how God takes over his body and sends electric shocks into his penis.

None of this is new or an original point. The anti-gay politician on the downlow is a perennial laughing stock in this country, and a mentally ill man struggling with a suppressed aspect of his identity is pretty low-effort stuff.

It's not the hypocrisy that I want to highlight here; it's the method of transmission. The lurid descriptions of 19 rock hard US marines in the showers at Ram Ranch, and the sexual fantasies of Bob Hickman are both examples of bad writing and what can be gleaned about someone through reading their bad writing.

Writing about how homosexuality is a sin on one hand, while describing Jesus' masculinity in lavishly homoerotic terms on the other. It's funny, yes, but more importantly, it reveals something about the interior of someone else's mind that you wouldn't have access to any other way. You're seeing inside someone's brain. That's remarkable.

The Grain of the Voice

Roland Barthes had a name for what I'm talking about. In his essay "The Grain of the Voice," he described the grain as the material residue of a particular body in the act of expression, specifically in singing, but the idea extends further. Barthes distinguished between what a performance means (the cultural, the intentional, the technically correct) and what the voice is (the breath, the friction, the body inscribed in the sound). The grain is the excess that can't be reduced to meaning or intention. It's what tells you that this specific person made this specific sound.

In writing, the grain is the eccentric syntax, the image that shouldn't work but does, the non-sequitur that tells you more about how someone actually thinks than any polished paragraph could. It's the stuff that survives when you don't suppress it, which means it's most visible in bad writing. Bad writing is grain, almost pure.

When you read something polished, you're reading what the writer wanted to communicate. When you read something unpolished, you're reading how they think.

Like Pearls Before Swine

What I'm afraid of with AI is that we're going to lose bad writing, and, with it, the grain.

The standard LLM voice is corporate. Samey. It was trained on professional documents, style guides, academic papers, business writing, etc. The model learned what writing is supposed to sound like by ingesting mountains of already-suppressed voices. The grain was trained out before the model ever opened its mouth. Social media data is layered on top of that core structure, giving access to new information but still compressed within that initial stylistic structure.

That alone would be bad enough. But the larger problem is what happens when people use these tools to polish their own writing before it goes public. The rough draft that included the weird phrasing, the contradictory argument, the sentence that runs on because the writer couldn't figure out where to stop…all of that disappears before anyone sees it. What gets published is standard and corporatized all the way down: scrubbed of the grain.

This isn't just an aesthetic loss. It's an epistemic one.

Bad writing is diagnostic. It's a window into how people actually think, instead of how they present their thinking. The homoerotic Christian propaganda isn't interesting because it's funny. It's interesting because it tells you something true about the person who wrote it, something they couldn't tell you directly, something they might not even know themselves. That kind of self-revelation doesn't survive editing. And if the AI does the editing before the writer has a chance to examine their own rough draft, they lose the feedback loop, the moment of recognition, the chance to learn something about themselves through the act of revision.

Bad writing, at its best, is an invitation. Here is my brain, unguarded. That invitation disappears when the LLM smooths it into something presentable.