Readers Response to Writing Badly

In his essay, “The Importance of Writing Badly,” Bruce Ballenger encourages students to write freely and to not worry about finding the “perfect way of saying it.” I feel by saying this he means to not worry about what you’re writing and it may not necessarily be perfect, but that you write what you are thinking and continue writing even if it’s bad or may not make sense. He means to put all your thoughts down on paper and start from there. Ballenger gives his students permission to write badly. He expresses that “when the writing stops, so does the thinking.” He also states that he is far more interested in encouraging thinking than error-free sentences and concise, clear writing.
Do I agree with Bruce Ballenger? I feel that I absolutely agree with him. If you would have asked me in High School if I agreed, I would have said no. My English teacher in High School was much like the teacher Ballenger describes in this essay as Mrs. O’Neill. Every paper we had to write had nothing but red pen marks correcting bad sentences. Or as Ballenger put it “some high priest of good grammar whose angry scribbling occupied the margins of our papers.” She was much more critical of our grammar and punctuation then what we were writing. This was very discouraging to me and a lot of my fellow classmates. I then became more critical of myself as a writer and how I was writing and not what I was writing. I was paying more attention to other details instead of what I was thinking about writing, which ended up making it very stressful to write. So by the end of my English class, I was fairly decent with grammar. In fact friends and family of mine occasionally have asked me to proof read papers of theirs, and I find myself doing nothing but fixing grammar issues instead of actually reading the paper for the story it is.
I agree with Ballenger when he says that clear writing matters and should be demanded, but that it should not be the first thing important when you start writing a