Thanks, I figured for cheap and fast art the "mid-school notebook scribbles" style was a good choice.
Truthfully the reason why the text pops like that is I was planning to use sysl-text, but after finding it impossible to work with I did the next fastest thing and just used love.graphics.printf to draw gradually growing substrings, so it doesn't take the final state into account when wrapping mid-scroll. If I do something like this again I'll definitely build a proper set of textboxes first.