How to recognize bad prose

I've read some. Did I ever mention I found Tolstoy's work unbelievably boring? A good story, nice characters, but incredebly boring.
(PS. Talking about War and Peace). I liked Dostojevski's "Idiot" much better.

War and Peace is boring. And Anna Karenina isn't much of an improvement; it's the Russian Gone With the Wind, a soap operatic epic written mainly for women. But that doesn't make Tolstoy a bad writer. Try reading Sebastopol, a journalistic account of the Crimean campaign in the Russo-Turkish War (the same war which inspired Tennyson's Charge of the Light Brigade.) It reads like the very best Hemingway -- sparse, merciless, focused and undoubtedly authentic.

I've read Anna KArenina as well, but I must say I liked the pace in that book a bit better. Still too slow for my taste, but better. And, btw, I will never claim Tolstoy is a bad writer. Never ever. Sebastopol I never read.

Read For whom the Bell Tolls by Hemingway, and I'm pretty sure I read a required one for english course, but I forgot which one. It was in the same period we had to read the Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald, which was a good book.
I think for whom the Bell tolls is quite good, and quite grim. Good characters IMHO. Just feels like a Greek tragedy at times.

Tennyson's Charge of the Light Brigade is supposedly one of the most exiting warstories ever, right? I've never read it, but I heard a great deal about it. All good btw.

Have you not read Eskimo Nell namjie?

I admit to not being able to get into Anna Karenina (did finish War and Peace, I might have been eighteen, remember liking it). It turns out that that was a symptom of a later disability, that I quaver and often if not always quit when I see the protagonist starting off on an ill-destined journey of emotions. I get aggravated. I got my first dose of it with Mme. Bovary, which I did finish but perhaps primed me for all this backing away - Edith Wharton's House of Mirth, a book well appreciated by many - and you know I, mad italophile, should like her since she was keen on Italy and its gardens and she had a keen eye, I gather, for her society, but, nah, I just slapped it shut and picked up another police procedural.

Nam, we all read for different reasons, even different sensations. The music in the bath of words - the sense with the sounds - matters to me. Intricacy of plotting, adventure in imagination, and many other aspects of writing matter more to others than myself. I like different types of writing, but am stopped short with stiff word 'flow'.

One more point - writing with stiff word flow is poor prose writing for me. I can't say what that matters to others.

My own field is design, in particular landscape and urban design. That plus some forays into painting. Well. One of my early teachers in all that made clear to us that facility (read, flow) doesn't always get to the essence of anything. It may be that people who don't just naturally draw horses well in profile or write sentences that sound like bubbling rivers do have serious and perhaps even new points to make. That the struggle may bring up complications the facile don't see.

I once read that if a writer can make the reader forget he is reading, it is successful. Guess that would be the "word flow" or ease in which a reader can put them selves into the plot and characters. Though not all reading is purely for entertainment and requires some thinking. If the writer intended the reader to do a little more than simply be entertained, and causes the reader to think, then it is successful in its own right.

As far as being able to analyze writing, writing styles and even use of wording etc......learn to use resources and educate yourself on proper use of nouns, verbs, etc.....if you see a word you do not know the meaning, look it up. Copy-editing is not easy, but using a computer can make this task much easier. Redundancy is often a common mistake in writing. Over stating the obvious is another. One area I try to avoid is the misuse of a thesaurus. Over-inflated wording can loose a reader in a heartbeat.

Good advice. I would add, never use a five dollar word where a ten cent word will do quite nicely, unless there's a specific, obvious need for it. Another sign of the amateur is the overuse of words which send a reader scurrying to the dictionary. There are people who will learn a new word and they simply must[/i[ use it in a sentence, whether apropos or not. And be careful with modifiers, especially adjectives. Don't describe your protagonist as "brave" or "intrepid" or "courageous" or anything else. His/her actions will show whether or not he is any of these things. No need to belabor the point. Verbs are a lot more impressive than adjectives. Don't say that it's a turbulent river. Say, rather, that the river surges.

I like some very taut writing, and some less taut writing. All taut all the time would drive me nuts. Okay and appropriate for business writing. Some of my favorite police procedurals are sparely written. I think the music of words has a place in descriptive writing, spare or lyrical, so I think that five dollar words can be the right choice at times. I think word choice is half the fun, but that being too clever with words is as much a slam down curtain as my previously mentioned stiff word flow.

Re business writing: we had a catchall class back in my landscape architecture school days, a class featuring visiting experts on different aspects of public presentation. The person who gave the lecture on writing was entirely pedantic on the never use a five dollar word side. I remember bristleing. Bristling?

I'll gear my communications relative to my clients, thank you very much. Contracts clear, of course.
Presenting at city council meetings, at design review boards, in front of an entire gathered family, all these have nuances re word choices.
Here I am talking about speech..
but decisions re word choices in speeches and in prose have in common that context and audience matter if one is trying to convince.

I think M. Andrew has a lot of experience in news editing. Communication is key there, no?
If you are writing a literary bit, then I think word choice is fairly wide, dependent on your own concerns.

One thing about learning to "copy-edit" everything from books, news articles, short stories, even poetry, letters and email, it makes a writer more aware of their word choices leading to better writing initially. Eventually, a writer will require less and less of the grueling task of copy-editing and rewrite.

Business correspondence and news writing should be dry and to the point, but I have see some flavorful news at times and have typed the final copy to business letters that were actually quite entertaining. The unexpected and breaking through the "accepted" norm sometimes is where bad writing gets published and applauded. Rare though, are these frontiers ever successfully approached.