Why awful writing is tolerated

Over at Lit Drift, Jessica Digiacinto asks, in a fed-up voice, why awful writing is tolerated. The proximate cause of her despair is last year’s Death Wish imitation Law Abiding Citizen, written by Kurt Wimmer. The film is “so full of every writing Don’t,” Digiacinto says, “it makes our mouths hang open in disbelief.”

I know exactly what she means. Several years ago I delivered myself of a lament about “Bad Writing” that earned me a bit of notoriety in academic quarters. “We work our asses off writing, rewriting,” Digiacinto says; “we beat ourselves up. . . .” And by we she means at least herself and me. Many’s the time that, like her, I have thrown up my hands in disgust when some scholar, in a profession dedicated to preserving and studying literary texts that were written with care, is praised and rewarded for writing that consists of little more than stringing together current commonplaces, uncrackable clumps of with-it terminology, careless voluble obscurity, and idées reçues.

Bad academic writers differ not at all from bad commercial writers. Instead of composing in words, bad writers compose in ready-made phrases. They do not notice when they have substituted approximation for exactitude, because their minds are elsewhere, usually on the unthreat­ening shrug of familiarity they want from their readers.

Digiacinto and I must simply accept the fact that an attentiveness to language is a minority pursuit. My wife has recently fallen in love with Daniel Silva’s series of thrillers with their Israeli hero Gabriel Allon. Eager to read anything that represents an Israeli as a hero, I picked up one of the books (my wife has already read five of them), but I was unable to outlast the first few pages—the prose was exasperatingly limp. My wife, who is a physician, has a motto that she teaches to her fellowship students: “The perfect is the enemy of the good.” In literature, though, “good enough” is no good at all.

Update: As long as I have quoted the great J. V. Cunningham once already today, I guess it’s all right to do so a second time. Why is awful writing tolerated? “Tolerance is almost identical to indifference.”