Quote:
Originally Posted by DanielKoehler
De gustibus non est disputandum. ("Concerning taste there may be no dispute.")
This Latin quote implies this question of "bad" writing has been addressed quite acceptably a couple of millenia ago.
The trick word is "badly". Very subjective. If a work has unintended grammatical, syntactical, or temporal errors, that is "bad" writing, IMO, i.e., it fails to be understood.
Other than that, it is all a matter of style and taste. Faulkner won a Nobel prize and his sentences go on for pages. Is that "good" writing? Beats me. Hemingway wrote in short sentences and he won the Nobel, too. Literary purists make me sick! As if anyone could be deemed to have the last word on matters of style and taste. The market is the arbiter. I imagine that, back in the day of Jules Verne, who used the passive voice ad nauseum, if anyone would write in first person, active voice, that writer would be denounced as a "bad" writer.
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I have to admit I hate Faulker's sentences. I frequently have to go back and re-read them.