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Managing Fictional Narrative Flow - Prose Style
Unit Completion Date: End of Week 9
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In day-to-day speech these automatic reflexes serve well, but in writing they can produce prose that is flat and repetitive, with the same structures and tics emerging again and again. Much of developing control over prose style involves learning to write intentionally rather than reflexively, unlearning how we already use language. It involves learning to eliminate the words and phrases that appear as fillers in spoken language, "word packages" to use Bernays and Painter's term from Exercise 53 in What If?
Developing and improving prose style requires an effort to write consciously in positive terms as well. Sentence structure, word choice, rhythm and rhyme provide opportunities to control the reading experience and reinforce content with form. There are, however, as many opinions of what constitutes good prose style as there are writers, which can be confusing to a young writer looking for guidelines.
William Strunk and E.B. White's classic The Elements of Style provides a set of rules the will help any young writer to focus on the process of writing prose. Learning to follow Strunk and White's rules will be of help to almost any writer, in part because they are sensible rules and in part because focusing on any set of rules will help the writer to think more consciously about the act of writing. Bernays and Painter list these rules on page 139 of What If?, in the introduction to their style section, but I highly recommend you purchase your own copy of The Elements of Style.
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