Characteristics of prose work

Characteristics of Prose Work
Before a thorough knowledge of techniques used in prose can be grasped, you need to acquaint yourself with the characteristics of prose works. These will be discussed with you in this section.

1. The prose work is the use of language in an imaginative way.
Prose is a work of the writer's imagination. It recounts the writer's life experience in an imaginative manner. When prose recounts only the artist's actual life experiences, it becomes autobiographical, when it presents historical facts in an imaginative, but not necessarily an accurate manner, it becomes historical literature. When it is restricted to the record of the life of another person by the writer, it is biographical. If the characters in the story go from one adventure to another, it is picturesque or episodic.

2. Prose work is dramatic. The writer creates a real or imaginary world, and presents actions and reactions to this world in form of dialogues, conversations, symbols (concrete objects used to represent serious ideas), images (a series of concrete objects represent ideas, one following the other in the story), and vivid descriptions. 3. Prose works are centered on narration. By this we mean recounting events as they occur in spatial or chronological order. In doing this, the writer packs the narration full of sensation, emotion, conflicting situations, sources of happiness, sadness and different responses to life situations.

4. Prose works combine description, argumentation, exposition, compare and contrast, cause and effect, classification and other rhetorical forms to make the storyline vivid and the message to come out as clearly as possible.

5. Prose works are largely to render a message or messages.
While we cannot rule out art for art sake, that is, writing to display sophisticated work of art, most prose works are presented to pass to the readers important messages regarding life in general, political, socio-economic life of a community, people or a nation, historical consequences of the action of some people on other groups, and so on.

Another way a prose work can be looked at is from the way coherence and unity is achieved. The technique of a good prose writer includes the ability to organize the prose work in a clear-cut fashion that has a beginning, a middle, a climax and an end. Of course flashback is possible, in which the end comes to the beginning, before the proper beginning of the prose work. Prose work is to be written in such a way that it gives coherence, continuity and wholeness.