Prose is made up of story and discourse. Story refers to the events while discourse refers to the techniques used to shape the reader’s perception. The author can use discourse to frame events and address ethics. Story and discourse combine to produce a particular version of events. The author’s use of story and discourse depends on their goals for storytelling.
Prose, be it a work of fiction or non-fiction, can be divided into two main components: story and discourse. History refers to the events that a piece of prose conveys, whether the real events of a news story or the fictitious ones of fiction. Discourse, on the other hand, refers to the techniques and methods that an author uses to present those basic events so as to shape the reader’s perception of the events in a narrative.
The events described in a written work are usually simplistic and amoral, in other words, neither good nor bad in and of themselves. A piece of prose may be about one country invading another, but the event itself is neither right nor wrong, it just happened. For example, the event itself usually doesn’t tell readers whether one country was justified in invading the other.
Speech is the element of prose that frames events to address questions of ethics and sets the connotations of action within the mind of the reader. The author can achieve this by using adjectives, adverbs, metaphors, and other descriptive devices to establish connotations of good and bad for the reader. For example, an author might talk about a “powerful” country invading a “weak” or “defenseless” one. In doing so, the writer frames the event as a situation of injustice towards the invaded country, placing that nation as the protagonist and the invader as the antagonist. Alternatively, the author could reverse this perception by referring to an “oppressed” country that ultimately attacks its “cruel” neighbor.
A story is usually a series of events that occurred in chronological order. Another form of discourse is choosing to tell stories in a similar order or selecting which events to include, which to exclude, and the order in which to tell them. In this way, story and discourse combine to produce a particular version of a basic set of events.
Using the above example of neighboring nations at war, an author may decide to build sympathy for the invading country by beginning a story with a terrible event that befell them. When written this way, the invading country’s actions may seem justified to the reader. The author could then turn the tables on his readers by including a flashback to an event that takes place before the story begins. This information could provide a justification for the original event, which had seemed so repugnant to the reader, that they recast the roles of protagonist and antagonist.
How an author uses story and discourse may depend on the author’s goals for storytelling. If the writer is trying to create an objective and informative piece, such as a news article, he or she may concentrate on presenting the events of the story, and the discourse plays little, if any, role in shaping the reader’s interpretation. Conversely, if the author tells a story to evoke a particular feeling in the reader—presenting events in a way that the reader sees them in a particular light—then the creator can use discourse methods to shape the story to evoke a desired reader reaction. The latter technique is often employed by persuasive essayists and fiction writers.
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