‘Teaching bad writing’

Abstract

ABSTRACTPeter Elbow advocates that we need to allow students to write ‘badly’, if only to expunge the dross and then move onto ‘good’ writing. Bad writing is not only poor grammatical expression, but also derivative, banal and formulaic writing borrowed from popular genre fiction. Bad writing is often characterised by melodrama, overwriting and ‘telling’ more than showing. However, ‘bad’ writing can also be regarded as a construct of masculinist power. In this paper, I examine the false binaries of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ writing, explore how I teach ‘good’ and ‘bad’ writing, and share some conventional and unconventional methods of leeching ‘bad’ writing from student work.