Rules for formatting the publication of prose include: a rectangular block of print; random, moot line breaks, which are accidents of printing; word-density on the page, crowded by comparison with most verse; arbitrary page breaks, numbered independently of the originating manuscript; and nets or lacings of white spaces between words and sentences. There is another condition, due to prose's printed format: any reprinted prose text past or future can reposition words on the page (higher, lower, left, right, centered).

Those elements make a mental picture of prose for us. We would usually recognize a prose page, as well as verse or a statistical table, from across a room. The picture might be at work though not thought about most of the time while we read. The surface shapes and rules of prose might also be an unconscious force acting on the history of thought. The neutral givens of prose could be prompts, though not imperatives, toward certain kinds of thinking. Intermittently, and by secondary gestures, novelists perhaps have represented the regulating conditions of their own prose medium. They have sometimes worked the look of the prose page understatedly into a general figurativeness, so that prose's seemingly neutral shapes ground the themes and interpretations of the novelists' worlds. The everyday prose page – not the illuminated or typographically daring one, but the minimal, recognizable least square of common print – amounts to a paradox of hypertrophied ordinariness, of what is “most ordinary,” a condition to be reinterpreted by novels.