The Ultimate Guide to Writing Good Prose

Updated April 2026 [First published May 2020]

This guide covers the craft of writing strong, readable prose, from common mistakes to sentence-level techniques that bring your characters alive on the page. Whether you're drafting your first novel or polishing your tenth, these are the fundamentals that separate amateur writing from professional.

Three Mistakes That Weaken Your Prose

There are no absolute rules in prose. Mike McCormack wrote the entirety of Solar Bones as a single sentence across 272 pages. But there are patterns that consistently pull readers out of a story, and once you learn to spot them, they're straightforward to fix.

1. Repetition (The Subtle Kind)

Every writer knows to hunt for crutch words: just, really, very, suddenly. But the repetition that actually damages your prose is harder to spot.

Different words, same meaning. You describe a room as cold in paragraph one, chilly in paragraph three, and icy in paragraph five. Each word is different, but the reader is getting the same sensory information three times. Once is enough. Twice is emphasis. Three times is a draft that hasn't been edited.

Same word, different meaning. The hum of a bee and the hum of an engine are technically different uses, but the reader's brain snags on the repetition. Swap one.

Duplicated characters. Do you have two mentors? Two sarcastic best friends? Two brooding love interests? If two characters serve the same function and have similar personalities, you almost certainly need to merge them into one stronger character.

Similar names. Natalie and Nancy. Tony and Tom. Your readers will confuse them, and confused readers put books down. Check your character list: if multiple names share an opening letter or syllable, change one.

Scene openings. Read the first line of each scene back to back. If four consecutive scenes open with a location description, or all start with dialogue, or all begin with internal monologue, that's structural repetition, and it makes your pacing feel monotonous even if the content varies.

2. Filtering

Filtering is when you insert the narrator's perception between the reader and the action. It's one of the most common habits in early drafts, and removing it instantly sharpens your prose.

Filter words include: I heard, she saw, he felt, I noticed, she realised, he thought.

With filtering:

I heard an owl hooting in the trees and a moment later I saw the canopy leaves rustle as if replying.

Without filtering:

An owl hooted in the trees and a moment later the canopy leaves rustled as if replying.

The second version puts the reader directly inside the scene. The first puts them one step removed, watching the narrator watch the scene. That extra layer of distance costs you immersion every single time.

You don't need to remove every instance. Sometimes a filter word is the clearest way to express something. But if you search your manuscript for heard, saw, felt, noticed, and realised, you'll find dozens of places where cutting them makes the sentence stronger.

3. No Scene Anchoring

Every time you open a new scene or chapter, your reader needs three things within the first few lines:

Who is telling this scene? Especially important if you write from multiple points of view. Don't make readers guess for half a page.

Where are we? If your characters have moved since the last scene, the reader needs to know immediately. They may have put the book down overnight. Don't assume they remember the geography.

When are we? Has an hour passed? A week? A year? Even a brief signal (The next morning… or Three weeks later…) is enough. Without it, readers feel unmoored.

Scene anchoring doesn't mean opening every chapter with a paragraph of exposition. A single, well-placed sentence can do all three: Maya hadn't been back to the café since November, but when she pushed through the door on a wet Tuesday in March, it smelled exactly the same.

That's who, where, and when in one line.

Sentence-Level Characterisation

One of the most powerful (and most overlooked) prose techniques is letting your characters' personalities shape the actual texture of the writing. Not just what they say or notice, but how the sentences feel when you're in their point of view.

Through Description

Take two characters watching the same town parade.

Character 1 (melancholy, observant):

They move like a current, each person flowing past the next. Supposedly united in their cause, but as they chant and sing for solidarity, it sounds like the melody of mourners. I see the tiny fractures, the gaps they leave between each other, the scattered looks, the fear of isolation.

Character 2 (angry, physical):

The villagers weave through the street brandishing placards like rifles. They're soldiers marching into their last battle. The war-drum beat of their feet grinds into my ears, rattling my teeth and making my blood boil.

Same event. Completely different prose. Character 1 uses longer sentences, more punctuation, words like fractures, isolation, mourners. Character 2 uses shorter, choppier sentences, onomatopoeic words (grind, rattle, boil) that create noise and aggression on the page.

This is what people mean when they talk about “voice” at the sentence level. It's not about vocabulary alone. It's about rhythm, sentence length, imagery patterns, and the emotional temperature of the word choices. When you get this right, readers can tell whose head they're in before you've named the character.

Through Dialogue

The same principle applies to speech. A pompous academic uses words like furthermore, I'll conditionally agree, notwithstanding. A teenager uses fragments, slang, and interrupts themselves mid-thought. A careful, anxious character hedges everything: I think maybe, it might be, I'm not sure but.

The test: cover the dialogue tags and read a page of conversation. If you can't tell who's speaking from the language alone, your characters aren't differentiated enough at the prose level.

What Good Prose Means in the Age of AI

Here's a question that didn't exist when this guide was first published in 2020: if an AI tool can produce grammatically correct, structurally competent prose in seconds, what does “writing good prose” actually mean now?

The answer is: the same things it always meant. Voice. Rhythm. Specificity. The strange, particular choices a human makes. The metaphor that comes from lived experience, the sentence that breaks a rule because breaking it sounds right, the description that's oddly specific in a way that makes it feel true.

AI prose tends toward the competent middle. It avoids mistakes, but it also avoids the interesting risks. It doesn't leave an awkward pause in dialogue because it hasn't felt that social discomfort. It doesn't describe grief as feeling like “a house with all the furniture moved two inches to the left” because it hasn't stood in that room.

This isn't an argument against using AI in your process. Plenty of authors use it productively for brainstorming, outlining, or generating first-pass material they then rewrite. But it is an argument for caring more about prose craft, not less. The things that make your writing distinctly yours (your rhythm, your obsessions, your way of seeing) are now the things that separate memorable books from forgettable ones. They always were. It's just more obvious now.

The practical takeaway: if a sentence in your manuscript could have been written by anyone, it probably needs work. Not because it's wrong, but because it's not yet yours.

Practical Tips From Working Authors

Read your work aloud. This is the single most effective self-editing technique. Your ear catches problems your eye skips: awkward rhythm, unnatural dialogue, sentences that run out of breath. If you stumble reading it, your reader will stumble too.

Cut 10% of your word count. Take any chapter and challenge yourself to remove one word in ten without losing meaning. You'll be surprised how many words are doing nothing. Adverbs modifying strong verbs. Dialogue tags where it's already clear who's speaking. Phrases like began to and started to where the character simply does the thing.

Vary your sentence length. Short sentences create urgency. Longer sentences allow the reader to settle into a rhythm, to follow a thought as it develops, to feel the texture of a moment. Used together, they create the rise and fall that makes prose feel alive rather than mechanical. Read a paragraph back. If every sentence is roughly the same length, something's wrong.

Hunt for throat-clearing. Many sentences start with a preamble that delays the point: It was at that moment that she decided… becomes She decided. The thing that surprised him most was… becomes What surprised him was, or better yet, just state the surprise. First words matter. Don't waste them on warm-up.

Write flash fiction. Nothing teaches economy like a 500-word limit. It forces you to choose the words with the most punch, cut everything that doesn't earn its place, and trust the reader to fill in what you've left out. Even if you never publish flash, the discipline transfers directly to your novels.

Listen to real speech. Not just people you know. Strangers on public transport, in shops, in restaurants. Different backgrounds, ages, and contexts produce different rhythms and vocabularies. The fastest way to write natural dialogue is to have a library of real speech patterns in your head.

Find your crutch words and kill them. Every writer has them. Common offenders: just, really, quite, seemed, somehow, practically. Use your word processor's search function to find yours, then go through them one by one. Some will be justified. Most won't.

Where to Go Next

If you want to go deeper into prose craft, Sacha Black's The Anatomy of Prose: 12 Steps to Sensational Sentences is an excellent practical guide. Sacha is a former ALLi blog manager and wrote the original version of this article.

For the editorial side (when to hire a developmental editor, a copy editor, or a proofreader, and what each one does) see our Editorial 101 guide.