English Literature: What is good writing really? Would Shakespeare flunk an undergraduate writing course?

It depends what you mean by "good writing." Overly florid writing without much intellectual substance or merit tends to annoy people regardless of where they learned English. I think the idea that grammatically complex structures and large vocabularies are required for concision and clarity is also dependent on how you define "concision and clarity." Part of being concise and clear involves the task of understanding ones' audience, and using discretion when it comes to determining whether or not one's expansive vocabulary would be helpful to the cause of communicating a particular concept or idea. That last part is where I tend to derive my definition of "good writing." Is the idea or concept communicated in a fashion that understands its audience? Is it communicated in a way others could understand? The question, then, is not so much about pushing language to its limits or fashioning personal conceits of "high" and "low" writing, but understanding the circumstances that require its utility and maximizing it thus. As such, the general belief concerning Shakespeare has been that when you give him rules, he'll deliver the optimal experience in the English Language. So asking if Shakespeare could pass an undergraduate writing course is kind of like asking "can LeBron James dribble a basketball the length of the court, back-and-forth, for 48 minutes?" The answer is, of course, "yes." But why the hell would anyone want to see that?

The paradigm of good writing in our (at least to my understanding) eyes is something you don't have to work to read, something that makes you think without needing the way it makes you think to be worthwhile to read. It uses words that are advanced, but not words that make you scramble to the dictionary when you can get the same effects for 3 simple words. no superfluous use of superfluous, and no pulling out a thesaurus when you write. Write what you would use when speaking, and don't use harder to follow language than that, unless it's because the character does. Certainly, writing is about the language- but in the end, this would be of equal, if not less quality, if i used fancy language that muddled this post. in the end, words are bricks and what you write is what you built with them. no one's impressed with a pile of fancy bricks, or you swapping in a fancier brick for the sake of pretension. Sure, we may find using only the  simplest bricks as awkward, but we don't want to be deliberately baffled by words we have never heard before simply for the sake of using those words. If you would use it in conversation or lecture, use it in the book. Otherwise, don't use that word. the new king james bible is a wonderful book, but it occasionally has awkward wording- an unfortunate symptom of how language changes across generations, and of the translator effect. To answer your first question, yes, Shakespeare would probably flunk one of those classes- i hear that the real author of his plays was a noble who could not publish plays (not an appropriate thing for nobility to do, apparently.), so he gave them to Shakespeare. If that is accurate, than shakespeare would not pass the class.

Note: The KJV authors used a deliberately archaic form of English (even in 1610) in order to add authority to the work. It's use of language is classic and, while not used today, is actually in its own way great English Literature. As far as W. Shakespeare, are his works still read today? Samuel Johnson wrote in the 1760s that his works "had stood the test of time" and that was 250 some years ago. And, the answer is yes. PS. Refrigerator instruction manuals are written in Chinglish (Chinese transliterated into English without the corrections needed to follow English grammar rules).

Elite opinion in the US and UK regarding what constitutes good writing is about the same. That's why England's best literary minds defect to the United States; the money is better here, and they don't have to change their mind about anything.