I want to begin thinking about the nature of prose again. Actually, I’ve been thinking about it a great deal for a long time, of course. I want to think out loud about it, I guess. I want to write about it. I want write prose about it, in fact.

I guess it’s almost a joke to say that prose is an ordinary thing. When we say something is “prosaic” we mean that it is ordinary. But it’s actually both the ordinariness and the orderliness of prose that I want to consider. Prose not only uses words in their ordinary senses, it tries to present ideas in an orderly way. It is, to be sure, able to say some entirely extraordinary things when it needs to, but its means are largely unremarkable.

In his preface to The Unending Rose, Borges said that “the mission of the poet should be to restore to the word, at least in a partial way, its primitive and now secret force.” We might say that the prose writer takes that secret force for granted. A truly “great” prose writer, we might even say, is trying to keep the secret. They leverage the force of language by a kind of a sleight of hand. We think we’re just seeing one word after another, just as we think the card magician is shuffling an ordinary deck of cards. But then, suddenly, the hair on the back of your neck stands up.

I have a worry about prose. I worry that prose is going out of style. (I guess that’s almost a joke too.) It is being replaced with a strange sort of jargon, in which a number of “big words” end up doing all the work. Writers have stopped producing effects by a combination of small, familiar words, a series of ordinary rhetorical “moves”. Instead, they invoke big and cumbersome concepts that the reader is asked to swallow without question. Indeed, these concepts are often combined in stock phrases that operate almost like words in their own right.

What I want to do over a few posts is to get back to the basic operations that make prose what it is. Of course, I want to think about this mainly at the level of the paragraph, which is the unit of scholarly composition. I want to look at a how a standard, academic prose paragraph works. Or, rather, how it should work.