At some point writers usually are given a copy of William Zinsser’s On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction.

What follows is not nonfiction. But what follows here isn’t good writing either, as compiled from current and past popular fiction by BrainJet in the spirit of the famous Bulwer–Lytton Bad Writing Contest.

We begin with the immensely popular, yet immensely bad, 50 Shades of Grey:

I am all gushing and breathy—like a child, not a grown woman who can vote and drink legally in the state of Washington.

Jeez, he looks so freaking hot. My subconscious is frantically fanning herself, and my inner goddess is swaying and writhing to some primal carnal rhythm.

Someone named Ron Miller wrote something called Silk and Steel, in which …

Her legs were quills. They were bundles of wicker, they were candelabra; the muscles were summer lightning, that flickered like a passing thought; they were captured eels or a cable on a windlass. Her thighs were geese, pythons, schooners. They were cypress or banyan; her thighs were a forge, they were shears; her thighs were sandstone, they were the sandstone buttresses of a cathedral, they were silk or cobwebs. Her calves were sweet with the sap of elders, her feet were bleached bones, her feet were driftwood. Her feet were springs, marmosets or locusts; her toes were snails, they were snails with shells of tears.

Stephenie Meyer, writer of the Twilight manglings of vampires, contributed:

Aro laughed. “Ha ha ha,” he giggled.

(Technically, a laugh and a giggle are not quite the same thing. “Ha ha ha” isn’t a giggle either.)

“Stop!” I shrieked, my voice echoing in the silence, jumping forward to put myself between them.

Claire Delacroix, not Yoda, wrote this in Unicorn Vengeance:

Like the wolf he was named for was he, he realized, for his life was solitary above all else.

(As one comment pointed out, however, wolves are pack animals, which makes this sentence not only badly constructed but based on a false premise.)

Dan Brown of The Da Vinci Code fame wrote elsewhere:

Physicist Leonardo Vetra smelled burning flesh, and he knew it was his own.

(And how did he know that? Did Vetra run test flesh burnings?)

Overhanging her precarious body was a jaundiced face whose skin resembled a sheet of parchment paper punctured by two emotionless eyes.

Just because you’re popular doesn’t mean every word is a pearl. Lee Child, Jack Reacher’s creator:

It was about as distinctive as the most distinctive thing you could ever think of.

Dean Koontz in Whispers:

“For a minute, the three of them sat in silence, within the expensive, single-engine, overhead-wing, two-hundred-mile-per-hour, sixteen-mile-per-gallon, white and red and mustard-yellow, airborne cocoon.”

Tom Clancy in Red Storm Rising:

“Fighter weather,” agreed Lieutenant Colonel Bill Jeffers, commander of the 57th Fighter Interceptor Squadron, the “Black Knights,” most of whose F-15 Eagle interceptors were sitting in the open a bare hundred yards away.

Bad writing is not a recent thing. Langston Hughes wrote in Thank You, M’Am:

He did not trust the woman not to trust him. And he did not want to be mistrusted now.

(I think that’s a double negative. Or something.)

Not many people may realize the human cartoon Rambo came off a serious movie, “First Blood,” which came from a novel that included …

One man came running off the corner to stop him, but Rambo kicked him away and then he was whipping left around the corner, and for now he was safe and he really got that cycle going.

This was found in a novel spun off the new “Star Wars” movie:

The TIE wibbles and wobbles through the air; careening drunkenly across the Myrran rooftops – it zigzags herkily-jerkily out of sight.

One wonders if any of these writers had editors. As one comment put it:

Our readers today are so illiterate, they wouldn’t know bad writing if their phones depended on it.

At least the creator of this list took the time to read more than one book, which based on another comment may not have been necessary:

I feel like just posting every sentence from 50 Shades of Grey would have been sufficient to make this list. Literally nothing ever written is as horrible as anything in that sad excuse for a book.

The existence of this list was derided as jealousy of successful writers by some. The counter to that is that popularity and quality are not the same thing, and all you need do is look at the Kardashians.