Some time ago, our founder Scootareader bumped me up to admin and told me that I was "in charge now"... for some reason. I haven't seen any reason to make any real changes, feeling that if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

A story I recently encountered, though, had me thinking that there's another language category that we could use. Think of it as a counterpart to Detrimental English, which is for fanfic that don't English no good. On the other end of the scale, we have the new Purple Prose folder, which is for people who know what they're doing... except that they're overdoing it.

Not sure what I mean? Well, here's the description I put in the folder itself:

For when one is struck by the realization that the quill, either literal or metaphorical, of an erstwhile wordsmith has been tasked to excess, and utilized to strain the tongue of Albion nigh to its breaking point.

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purple prose - Extravagant or flowery writing, especially in a literary work.

The folder description was meant to be an example of it. Here's a paraphrase of what I said above that's much more in line with how I would normally write: "For when you realize that a writer's pen is working too hard and straining the English language."

Of course, if I weren't trying to do a little straining myself, I wouldn't have even put it like that. If I weren't too smart for my own good, I probably would have just said something like "Stories with excessively flowery or overly detailed writing go here." (In fact, I think I'll go add that to the description.)

Hope that helps.

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As much as I love purple prose - and feel a story is a bit bare without it sometimes - it really is the sugar of writing; One spoon of it's nice, a bag leads to tooth decay