The teacher of English prose is responsible for teaching students three skills: the ability to react with appropriate sensibility to prose literature, the ability to understand written prose, and the ability to write prose that can be understood. A study of the precision and demands of the best modern novelists (Joyce, Lawrence, Woolf, Faulkner, and Hemingway) can broaden the literary response of students overexposed to the classical styles of the early 17th and 18th centuries (Browne and Johnson) or to the romantic styles that appeared in the later 18th and 19th centuries. Comparing the purpose, form, and communication success of the simple language of Robert Boyle and the Royal Society to the prose of later scientists, sociologists, and critics can illustrate the ways that style may interfere with the conveyance of ideas. In teaching writing, the heavily Latinate context of most modern grammars needs to be opposed in favor of clarity, good construction, and effective communication of the author's ideas. (LH)