Among all styles, prose is the most familiar and unfamiliar one. The most familiar is because all literate people have read it, and the least familiar is because it is not easy to explain what prose is. This is because prose is the most unstable style in content and form, with great freedom and randomness. It is also because of the constant changes in the connotation and extension of prose in the long-term development process that people's knowledge and understanding of it are constantly changing, and the stylistic concept of prose has different characteristics with the changes of the times. Therefore, when we talk about prose, write prose and read prose today, our understanding of prose is often not completely consistent. Based on this, it is necessary for us to examine the evolution of the concept of prose style, position the prose style and make clear what prose is.

In ancient times, prose refers to prose. Judging from the writing practice, there were prose as early as Shang Dynasty, and Oracle Bone Inscriptions and Jin Wen were the representatives of early prose. Although they are extremely simple notes, simple and simple, as a style opposite to poetry, they obviously exist independently. The advent of Zhouyi and Chunqiu shows that people have begun to pay attention to the art of prose, and the emergence of historical prose such as Zuo Zhuan, Guoyu and Warring States Policy shows that people have mastered the function of prose notes to a considerable extent. The successive launch of essays such as The Analects of Confucius, Mencius, Zhuangzi and Xunzi not only shows that people have a good understanding of the argumentative function of prose, but also shows that people have a good understanding of the structural art and institutional characteristics of prose. The appearance of Song Yu's Feng Fu and Gao Tang Shen Fu further shows that people can express their feelings with prose. It can be said that by the end of the Warring States period, prose as a style was fully mature, but people had no concept of prose style.

In the Han Dynasty, with the development of society and the prosperity of culture, people's understanding of style has made obvious progress compared with that of the pre-Qin period, and they have a preliminary sense of style. Due to the increasing prosperity of literary creation mainly composed of poems, words and essays, the status of literary works has been unprecedentedly improved, and there has been a trend of separation between literature and academics. During the Wei and Jin Dynasties, literature entered the so-called "conscious era", and not only a large number of literati who were good at poetry and prose appeared, but also the discussion on stylistic classification and various stylistic features attracted great attention. Liu Xie's Wen Xin Diao Long divided all the styles into two categories according to the popular ideas at that time. Writing refers to verse, and writing refers to non-verse. The former refers to rhythmic poems, Sao, Fu and Yuefu, while the latter refers to all narrative, argumentative and lyric articles except rhymes, including literary articles such as philosophers and historical biographies, as well as practical articles such as letters, scripts and sparse classics that lack literariness.

During the Southern and Northern Dynasties, there were brand-new changes in the form of prose. Parallel prose and parallel sentences became the main forms of the article, which was opposite to Japanese works and produced four or six neat and fixed parallel prose. As a stylistic name, the word "prose" was first seen in He Lin Yu Lu written by Luo Dajing in the Southern Song Dynasty. Yang Dongshan's paper is quoted in the book as saying: "Gu (Huang Tingjian)' s poems are wonderful in the world, but his prose is quite trivial and cramped." The "prose" here obviously refers to the prose as opposed to poetry. In fact, the concept of literary "prose" did not arise in ancient times, and all literary and non-literary prose articles were included in the category of "prose".

Modern prose-the orientation as a style.

With the emergence and maturity of novel, drama and other new styles, it is not enough and appropriate to use the broad concept of "prose" to summarize the family of prose after they have achieved an equal position with poetry and prose. Therefore, under the influence of the western concept of "prose", a concept of literary prose style, which is juxtaposed with poetry, novel and drama, began to appear, and scholars began to discuss its stylistic orientation. First, some people clearly classify prose as literature and exclude non-literary articles from prose. Then, prose, novel, poetry and drama are clearly mentioned together and divided into four major literary styles. Thus formally defined the concept of prose in the modern sense. However, all literary genres except poetry, novel, drama, folk art and film literature are classified as prose, which includes prose, essays, sketches, travel notes, features, communications, reportage, biographies and so on. Its main characteristics are individuality, lyricism and freedom.

With the increasing prosperity of prose creation, the personality characteristics of other members of the prose family are rapidly formed and clearly displayed. You can be friends with prose, such as essays, reportage, popular science sketches, etc. Therefore, it is independent from the prose family, making the conceptual connotation of prose more and more pure literature.

Stylistic orientation of prose in the new period. With the upsurge of prose creation in 1990s, there appeared the diversification of prose expression techniques. The innovative trend of prose, represented by "cultural prose", promoted the revolution of various "trendy prose" styles, made the prose style present a colorful situation, and triggered people to re-examine and think about the prose style. It is decided by combining various opinions and the actual situation of the current literary world. We believe that prose is a literary style that can make full use of all kinds of themes, creatively use all kinds of literary expressions, freely show the personality style of the subject, take lyric freehand brushwork as the main purpose and widely reflect social life.