"How to Write Badly Well"

Okay, great writing site to add to your list. U.K.-based writer and performer Joel Stickely turns his attention often and bluntly toward bad writing on hist site "How to Write Badly Well".

Here's what Joel does: He'll do a post where he posits a bad writing tendency, then displays said bad writing tendency in a gross misuse of words. Three examples:

Qualify every description

Standing on my feet on the floor of my kitchen in my home in Glasgow, I looked with my blue eyes out of the double-glazed window which sat in the middle of the wall like a clear panel of carefully-engineered plastic in the middle of an interior wall. The rain was falling from clouds and through the air, down towards the ground, where it landed, making wet puddles of water on the grey pavement far below where it had started from.

I was hungry in my stomach. Scratching the back of my head with the fingers of my left hand, I opened the door of the fridge which stood next to the window on the opposite side of the room from the tall oak door. An electric light inside the fridge came on inside the fridge and illuminated the inside of the fridge. With my right hand, I picked up the Davidstow mature cheddar cheese which sat next to a brightly-coloured plastic tub of butter-substitute vegetable-oil-based spread. I also picked up the vegetable-oil-based spread. I would have a sandwich to eat with my mouth.

If you've found a phrase you like, keep repeating it

Needless to say, I was fully aware of the behind-the-scenes machinations which, needless to say, would ultimately result in my departure from the executive board of VoxMagic Enterprises. The VP of Product Interface Experience who was, needless to say, a close personal friend of mine, kept me fully informed of who was saying what to whom and when – needless to say, this involved me needlessly hearing a lot of what people had to say about me, which, needless to say, was not all of a positive nature.

Needless to say, this period of needless nay-saying was brought to a swift (although, needless to say, temporary) end by the introduction of our revolutionary predictive transcription system, VoxMagic Ultra, which, needless to say, changed the whole face of voice recognition technology, allowing, as it did, the pre-emptive conversion of spoken sound to text. Needless to say, it was an exciting time for the whole industry, no matter what anyone might needlessly say about the needs of, say, the consumer and, it needs to be said, I was at the forefront of this (needless to say) revolutionary paradigm-shift. For the first time, we had produced speech recognition software so advanced that we had eliminated the need to actually say anything.

If the plot gets out of hand, simply synopsize large chunks

Penelope turned away from the mirror and looked her husband directly in the eyes for the first time in two months.

‘Martin,’ she said, ‘I don’t believe you.’

‘You don’t...’ He stopped, breathed, clenched his fists. ‘You don’t, do you?’

’No.’ She turned back to the mirror. ‘I don’t. You see, after Michael left that evening, I found your notebook – the one you had tucked under the corner of the carpet.’ There was silence for a few seconds.

‘And?’

After the ensuing argument, Penelope filed for divorce, although the process proved more costly than she had anticipated and the loan she took out to cover her legal fees would have bankrupted her had it not been for Michael’s intervention. This, though, brought its own set of problems, as Michael’s wife assumed (wrongly, as it happened) that Michael’s interest in Penelope’s wellbeing was a result of something beyond merely friendly concern. This led to an estrangement between Michael and Susan which, although not as rancourous as that between Penelope and Martin, nonetheless took its toll on all concerned. So it was that both Penelope and Michael found themselves, some months later, nominally single; it is at this point that we resume our tale...

Yes, indeed, Joel writes badly well.

H/T to Nicholas for forwarding me this link.