The first and most profound inspiration for 🧻 The Bad Writing Award is The Bad Writing Contest run by the late great Denis Dutton in the journal Philosophy and Literature between 1995 and 1998. This is how that contest described itself at the time:
The Bad Writing Contest celebrates the most stylistically lamentable passages found in scholarly books and articles published in the last few years. Ordinary journalism, fiction, departmental memos, etc. are not eligible, nor are parodies: entries must be non-ironic, from serious, published academic journals or books. Deliberate parody cannot be allowed in a field where unintended self-parody is so widespread.
The prize's "winners" were all famous within the theoretical humanities: Fredric Jameson in 1995 and 1997, Roy Bhaskar in 1996, but was most famously won by Judith Butler in 1998 for the following passage which was first originally published in 1997 in the journal Diacritics:
Judith Butler
The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.
-Judith Butler
Butler's writing is regularly cited as amongst the very worst of academic writing. One such criticism is by Dr. Cathy Birkenstein who in the January 2010 edition of the Journal College English, and in referring to Denis Dutton's Bad Writing Prize, said of Butler's work:
It is hard to think of a writer whose work has been more prominently upheld as an example of bad academic writing than the philosopher and literary theorist Judith Butler. In 1998, Butler was awarded first prize in the annual Bad Writing Contest established by the journal Philosophy and Literature, and early in 1999, was lampooned in an editorial in the Wall Street Journal by Denis Dutton, one of the chief architects of the contest. Quoting Butler’s award-winning sentence, Dutton claimed that Butler’s “inept,” “jargon-laden” prose was typical of the obscurantist writing being admired and emulated in the most elite circles of today’s academic humanities.
In the same article Birkenstein further went on to say of Butlers work:
Passages like this, Dutton argued, show that Butler and the other allegedly incomprehensible writers targeted by his contest are mere “kitch theorists” who, unlike genuine philosophers like Kant and Aristotle, “hope to persuade audiences not by argument but by obscurity.” Such writers, Dutton claimed, only “mimic the effects of rigour and profundity without actually doing serious intellectual work.”
Alan Sokal and the Sokal Affair
Alan Sokal
The second inspiration for 🧻 The Bad Writing Award is Alan Sokal and the events usually referred to as the Sokal Affair.
In 1996, Alan submitted an article to one of the leading academic journal's of postmodern cultural studies called Social Text. He wanted to test the journal's intellectual rigour, specifically to investigate whether:
"a leading North American journal of cultural studies—whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross—[would] publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions."
The article entitled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", was published in the journal's spring/summer 1996 "Science Wars" issue. It proposed that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct. At that time, the journal did not practice academic peer review and it did not submit the article for outside expert review by a physicist. Three weeks after its publication in May 1996, Sokal revealed in the magazine Lingua Franca that the article was a hoax.
The hoax caused controversy about the scholarly merit of commentary on the physical sciences by those in the humanities; the influence of postmodern philosophy on social disciplines in general; and academic ethics, including whether Sokal was wrong to deceive the editors or readers of Social Text; and whether Social Text had abided by proper scientific ethics.
The final and most substantial inspiration is the collected work of the Grievance studies affair conducted by Helen Pluckrose, Peter Beghossian and James Lindsay during 2017 & 2018.
A significant amount of media attention was generated by the hoax in a number of prominent international publications such as Janny Scott's New York Times article on from 18th May, 1996, Section 1, Page 1.