Showdown: Prose vs verse

This week we're continuing the series comparing different forms of writing. You can get more background on the project by reading the first installment comparing long- and short-form texts, and catch up by reading last month's post about fiction and non-fiction.

I use the terms “prose” and “verse” quite a lot, but I don’t think I’ve ever really defined them; now seems like a good time to do so. Prose is written content that does not follow a specific set of structural and formatting conventions, but simply adheres to whatever the usual patterns for the publication happen to be—there is no metre to the words, and the text is generally structured into paragraphs. Verse, on the other hand, is very deliberate in its structure and formatting; it may follow a set metre and/or rhyme scheme, and does not use a standard paragraph structure.

For the most part, poetry tends to fall under verse while prose encompasses things like novels, short stories, and various types of non-fiction. Plays are usually set aside as their own category, but if you’ve ever studied Shakespeare you’ll know that plays can use prose and verse within their lines. The vast majority of modern plays are all prose, but older forms of performance pieces are often based in verse, as this makes them easier to remember—we’ll have a look at this more in a future post, I'm sure.