On The Book Designer:

When I say ‘purple prose,’ what springs to mind?

Probably dense, complicated chunks of classic books you were forced to read in high school, or maybe Twitter screenshots of embarrassing novels laden with straining metaphors. If anything, you probably know that it’s ‘bad,’ and that we’re supposed to not do it.

But what is it, really, and why should we avoid it? Are there instances where purple prose is good, actually? Let’s discuss how to identify purple prose and fix it when we run into it in our own writing.

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