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Managing Fictional Narrative Flow - Prose Style
Unit Completion Date: End of Week 9
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Most novice writers can improve their prose style by leaps and bounds with attention to a few common tendencies that produce weak prose:
1. Use of passive voice. Instead of "There was a man walking down the road," use the more authoritative construction "A man walked down the road."
2. Syntax that produces logical confusion or impossibilities. This often occurs when a writer begins a sentence with an infinite-verb phrase such as "Standing up from the table,..." This can lead to sentences like, "Getting up from the chair, Ryan's eyes locked with Brett's." Here, the sentence indicates that Ryan's eyes were sitting in a chair and somehow got up.
3. Uncontrolled diction. The level of language a writer employs needs to be under control. Young writers often mix formal and informal wording and syntax at random, such as "John rose and adjusted the angle of his sunglasses, and then took off down the road." The phrase "took off down the road" is markedly more casual than the rather stiff description in the first half of the sentence. Like pacing and psychic distance, diction changes throughout a story to produce dramatic effects, but these changes should be intentional.
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