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

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…