INTRODUCTION TO PROSE FORMS.

 F.Y.B.A. (ENG)                                                                      

 SEM : 1                                                                                    

 DSC : 101 (PROSE)                                                               

PROSE.

The word prose comes from the identical middle French word prose, which served as shorthand for the latin phrase 'Prosa oratio' which means 'Direct Speech'. It originally occured in English in the 14th century, in the first edition of the Wycliffe Bible, a popular translation of a latin text into middle English, and in Geoffrey Chaucer's "The Tale of Melibee".

During the early Middle Ages, when the English language was developing, scholastic and religious work, as well as government documents, were frequently written in Latin. Because of the recent Norman invasion in 1066, which brought with it a French Speaking noble class, English was considered the language of commoners.

Geoffrey Chaucer, a fourteenth-century British poet, was one of the first to compose literature in English and is usually regarded as "the father of English literature."His famous Canterbury Tales is a combination of Prose and verse. 

Prose is a type of writing that has a natural flow with both speech and writing. It is grammatically correct but lacks the metrical framework that poetry would have.

Literature is divided into genres, and each genre can be either fictional or nonfictional. Fiction is built on one's imagination and fantasies. Fiction includes short stories, novels, myths, legends, and fairy tales, all of which have characters, plots, settings, and dialogue.

Nonfiction refers to true stories about real people and events. This category includes textbooks, newspaper articles, histories, biographies, journalism, essays, and instruction manuals. Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl, a collection of journal extracts, describes the young teen's experience hiding with her family in Nazi-occupied Holland during WWII.

In brief, fiction portrays something that is not true, it is unreal, whereas nonfiction represents a true account. Fiction is defined as literary work created only by one's imagination, i.e. the author's creative thought or made-up stories and characters. Reading a nonfictional work, on the other hand, means that you are reading about something that actually happened or someone who exists, i.e. it is not a made-up story, but rather a factual and evidence-based account.

The work of fiction is never based on a true story, and so when we read such works, it visualises situations that we may never face in reality, or we meet characters that we may never meet in our real lives, and it also transports us to a world that we may never visit otherwise.

 

 

Key Differences Between Fiction and Non fiction.

FICTION	NON FICTION
1.     Contains the imaginary World.	Contains real events or facts.
2.     Subjective	Objective
3.     The flexibility, to move the story in the direction which make it more exciting and interesting.	Do not have such flexibility because they have to provide information which is true and real.
4.     Purpose of writing fiction is to entertain the readers.	Nonfiction writing educates the reader about a subject or to further their knowledge about something.
5.     References may or may not be provided by the author.	References are provided compulsorily by the writer wherever required, so as to make the writing more credible.