What is Prose?, A definition Options

[Cleo_Serapis]

What is Prose anyway?

PROSE can be defined as: The ordinary way we speak and write in sentences and paragraphs. (Examples: newspapers, magazines, letters, novels, short stories, speeches, conversations, everything except POETRY.)

Prose is the unrhymed, nonmetrical, everyday language we speak and write at any or all levels. We usually mean written language when we use the word prose, however, and we contrast prose with poetry or verse. Sometimes (but rarely) we contrast it with fiction, as well.

Inadvertent rhyme in prose, as in "Please clean the screen", can often mar a passage’s effectiveness, just as deliberate use of it is a favorite attention-getting device in advertising.
Like excessive alliteration, deliberate rhyme in prose, especially rime riche (pronounced REEM REESH), which uses two or more words pronounced and sometimes spelled alike but with different meanings (as in He’s a fishy sort, with no more soul than a sole), is of dubious merit except for jocular use.

Good prose usually avoids repetitive regular metrical patterns, just as it avoids or minimizes inadvertent rhyme, but that doesn’t mean it lacks rhythm. Avoid insistently obvious patterns, particularly overlong stretches of text, because rocking-horse regularity can be either soporific or inadvertently funny. Seek instead the variety and effectiveness of a rhythm that reinforces meaning, provides variety, and is easy and pleasant to read, silently or aloud. Parallelism, as in I came, I saw, I conquered, judicious placement of adverbs, as in Attempt the work willingly, accept its discomforts patiently, and respond to the result cheerfully, variety in lengths and kinds of sentences, as in We planned the attack with care, we committed our resources with restraint, and we controlled our zeal with patience; nonetheless, we failed, and juxtapositions of grammatical and rhetorical stress, as in with liberty and justice for all, are all examples of ways you can vary and control the rhythm of your prose.

Source: http://www.bartleby.com

[Ephiny]

Hello everyone!

What an interesting discussion and question!!  

For me personally, I always think of the difference between poetry and prose as..well..kind of like sharpening a pencil!!  For me, poetry is prose pared right down to the very substance of the piece (which is strange for me to say since I really need to learn how to edit properly!)  But I think sometimes, as someone made the point above with reference to Joyce, a piece of prose, can sound or feel like poetry to the reader and similarly, a poem can seem more like prose.  Sometimes I've written what I thought was a poem and realised afterwards that it works much better as a piece of prose.  But what that difference really is..it's so hard to define completely.  Does anyone else find that sometimes specific lines of a poem just stick in your head in certain times or situations?!

I remember the first poem I ever wrote..I was ten years old and it was after the very worst time of my life.  The poem itself was nothing special, not least because I thought that a poem HAD to rhyme, no matter what you needed to do to the lines or words to make it!  It was very simple but yet I still know it by heart today and when I think of it, the words still surprise me, not because they are anyway impressive but simply because what I thought/felt at the time surprises me.  Maybe what I'm trying to say about poetry is something like..a poem sort of sums up something in your mind, maybe there is more room for images to enter or for the imagination to take hold..for so many different and unique reasons.

And yet..prose can do the same thing, I think... so after waffling on and on, I haven't really made any clear point!!

PS John, I like your style!!