Purple prose

Purple prose is writing whose ornament exceeds what the moment can carry — elaborate diction, piled-up adjectives and strained metaphor that draw attention to the writing instead of the thing being written about.

The name is old. Horace, in the Ars Poetica, mocks the purpureus pannus — the purple patch stitched onto a plain garment to make it look expensive.

The usual symptoms: every noun wearing two adjectives; a fresh metaphor in every sentence, so none of them land; abstractions capitalised into significance; and the vocabulary of avoidance, where eyes become orbs and a walk becomes a perambulation.

The important caution is that this is a judgement about proportion, not about richness. Nabokov, Baldwin and Morrison are all lavish, and none of them are purple, because the intensity of the language matches the intensity of what it is describing. A flat scene dressed in high language is purple. So is a genuinely enormous moment overdressed past the point the reader can hold.

In a line edit the practical repairs are dull and effective: cut the second adjective, keep one image per beat, and let the plainest sentence in the paragraph carry the most important fact.