[1-2-Read] You’re Not Stupid, The Writing’s Just Bad
Is It Difficult To Read or Is It Just Bad?
![[1-2-Read] You’re Not Stupid, The Writing’s Just Bad](/content/images/size/w1460/2025/07/dazzle--2--1.jpg)
Welcome to 1-2-Read, a fortnightly letter for paid subscribers! Every issue will give you an idea and two reading practices so that you can walk away as a stronger reader. Your contributions keep the lights on around here, and thank you so much for your support!
(1) The Idea: How To Spot Bad Writing
Welcome back to another issue of our 1-2-Read segment for paid members! And today, we’ll tackle a problem that plagues every reader, even experienced ones.
See, there are three types of prose in the world. One is pleasant to read, the other has something to say but makes you work for it, and the third (in the naughty corner) is unpleasant to read and has nothing to say. While the first one is pretty easy to spot, it’s difficult to tell apart difficult writing from bad writing.
So, let’s begin with a quote from a residential favourite: Michel de Montaigne. He wrote this about difficult writing:
“Difficulty is a coin which the learned conjure with so as not to reveal the vanity of their studies and which human stupidity is keen to accept in payment.”
What he’s saying is that bad writing scrambles for a costume to dress itself up in dense prose, whereas good writing isn’t afraid to walk around naked.
Let’s come back to you: when you’re trying to tell bad writing from difficult (yet rewarding) writing, it’s useful to know what these costumes look like, feel like and read like, so that you can strip them off and see if the idea is worth your time.
Yes, some great ideas can still wear costumes, but in learning how to identify them, you can take back control and appreciate good ideas for what they are, and reject weak ideas dressed in purple prose.
I stole a lot of these costumes from Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style, and they are: meta-discourse, signposting, hedging, zombie nouns, and passive voice. They all probably sound like nonsense to you now but stick with me and let’s go through them one by one.
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