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I suspect that many encounters with bad writing occur when readers stray accross boundaries. Consider an 11th c. reader of the world's first novel, the Tale of Genji. Genji is full of courtly machinations and allusions to classical poetry because that is what mattered to Lady Murasaki and her readers. To an 11th c. Genji reader, a Dostoevsky novel with plebian characters and language would have been scandalous. And when writers like Joyce & Henry Miller took the bourgeois novel to its logical conclusions with toliet scenes, eating, drinking, and sex, this was an outrage. Ulysses was banned until 1934 in the US, longer elsewhere. Tropic of Cancer was an obscenity until 1964 (maybe still, depending on who you ask.).
Academic writing is generally pretty bad if you're not in academics yourself. In the humanities, writers feel compelled to make allusions to the classics and current authorities. It's positively Malinowski-esque! Social science academics are famous for using jargon to mark the boundaries of their disciplines. Science papers are spaghetti strands of greco-roman neologisms sprinkled with passive verbs. But if you are an academic, you know why people write like that -- and you probably do it, too.
As a former teacher (of writing among other things), i've probably read more "bad writing" than the average person. I'm more forgiving of things like spelling and grammar errors or mangled metaphors if the writer has something coherent to say. So many writers really have nothing to say. To me that is the one unpardonable sin.
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