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What Makes Good Prose? (and how to become a better writer) — Part 1
If you are a writer that cares about quality in your sentence structure, flow and connected threads through your story, all while using a style you have curated to your own liking, then you are dealing with the mysterious nature of ‘prose’. As we all learn to write better, you have most likely asked the question:
What makes good prose?
Here I will attempt to give first a breakdown of prose as we best can understand it, and then I will show theories of its nature, and delve into ideas regarding what we find makes it good, versus what we find makes it bad.
What is Prose?
The word ‘prose’ in its most primordial essence derives from the Latin word ‘prorsus’, meaning direct, with the later old French word ‘porsus’ meaning straightforward. In other words, the meaning of ‘prose’ is normal direct speech encountered in every day life, only in written form. If I were to be speaking to you in person right now, I would use the same structure and syntax in my sentences as I do in my writing. So prose is language in its most ordinary form, the form that can convey information to another person effectively.
With this definition in mind, we can see what is the direct opposite to prose, metrical structure, or structured poetry dealing…
