: Re: What's the difference between purple prose and vividly descriptive writing? Elements of Style describes purple prose as "hard to digest, generally unwholesome, and sometimes nauseating." In short,

@Annie587

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Sometimes purple prose is an attempt to impress the reader with how smart the author is.

I work in the software business and I have to do a fair amount of technical writing. And I've very routinely found that if I write something that is simple, clear, and direct, someone else in the company will edit it to make it less easy to read. I recall one time that I wrote the first draft of a user manual for a software product, and the editor at corporate headquarters apparently did a search-and-replace in MS Word to change every occurrence of "use" to "utilize" and dozens of other such changes. Editors regularly tell me that they need to make such changes to my writing to make it "sound more professional". Because heaven forbid if someone could understand it.

It's lead me to conclude that there are two kinds of writers in the world: (a) Those who want to convey an idea or a story to the reader; and (b) Those who want to impress the reader with how smart the author must be to understand this complicated subject or to know all these big hard words.

Other times, purple prose is an attempt to be profound.

I think trying to be profound is inherently risky. If you try to write a story that is action-packed and fail, you could still end up with a story that is somewhat action-packed. Or if you try to write a story that is romantic and fail, you may still end up with a story that is somewhat romantic. But if you try to write a story that is profound and fail, you rarely end up with a story that is "somewhat profound". You usually end up with something that is pretentious and lame.

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