In Praise of Purple Prose: A Guide to Writing with Elegance, Opulence, and Indulgence (Skills for Scholars)

A playful and irreverent argument for-and practical guide to-writing in a rich and extraordinary styleWhen it comes to literary style, the commonplace wisdom of composition classrooms, newsrooms, and editorial offices has long been that less is more.Students are taught that the best prose is that which eschews ornamentation and rhetorical flourish.But what if sometimes more is more? In Praise of Purple Prose playfully and cheekily contests a century worth of convention that rejects the baroque and byzantine as “purple prose,” making the case that fun and joy in language can be as important as concision and comprehension.Part style guide and part manifesto, the book rewrites the rules on writing. Ed Simon encourages writers to embrace the extraordinary, to call upon the classical rhetorical devices, and to relish in the richness of description and the erudition of allusion.He demonstrates that serpentine syntax, eccentric diction, and idiosyncratic punctuation, when used judiciously, ca