What Is Purple Prose, Beige Prose, and Blue Language?

Lucille Moncrief
9 min readApr 4, 2017

Maybe you’ve heard of purple prose, beige prose, or blue language. Or, maybe you haven’t. Either way, a primer on each of them can help prevent some common writing faux pas.

Let’s start with the most controversial: purple prose.

Purple prose is flowery and ornate language. It sacrifices plot and clarity for indulgent detail. A piece of prose can be entirely purple, or it can have ornate bits sprinkled throughout. We call cases of the latter “purple patches.”

Purple prose is like showing up in stilettos to go on a hike. The language doesn’t match the occasion or the character. It draws attention to itself. It doesn’t advance the action, clarify the plot, or reveal a character’s intentions or thoughts. It’s fluff — description for description’s sake. Imagine being thirsty and drinking out of a fire hose instead of just getting a glass of water. This is what purple prose does. It drowns the reader.

Purple prose is not simply the use of “big words.” One person’s ten-cent word is another’s dime-a-dozen, and higher level vocabulary is not the issue. The problem occurs when you insert a ten-cent word into writing that is otherwise grammatically simple. Purple prose and patches can be identified easily, because when either crop up, everything from tone to lexis doesn’t “match.”

Purple prose is also not the same as lyrical, poetic writing. If your character is about to open a wardrobe, you don’t need to describe the wardrobe in ornate, repetitive detail. Here’s an example:

The young, precocious child of elementary school age was commanded by his endearing and loving mother to put on a change of clothes. He lumbered up the crooked and creaking stairs to his massive wardrobe that could rival Narnia’s. It was very old and worn, made of a dark and foreboding walnut, reliefs of ancient Roman and Greek gods festooned its rough visage. He opened it gingerly and it creaked and groaned in ominous protest.

This is way too much. Describing a child’s simple wardrobe with words like “visage” and “foreboding walnut” is overwrought. Words like that will blur the tone of the story, and take the reader on a confusing tangent.

Moreover, the entire paragraph didn’t actually show us anything — although it certainly did a lot of telling, something you don’t want in your writing. A good rule of thumb in determining whether or not writing is purple is if…

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