Richard A. Lanham

As its title implies, this book deals with revising, not with original composition. Stressing the importance of the single sentence, The Paramedic Method of revision provides an easily learned method of revision to combat the obscurities of meaning that plague The Official Style, and demonstrates how to revise this stilted, dense prose into plain English. This book has been used with success wherever extensive writing is required, and also at every level of higher education. Addresses the specific stylistic patterns that characterize most bad writing and gives an eight-step revision method called The Paramedic Method to break those patterns and improve writing. Helps with writing tasks in business, government, and the university, where The Official Style is rampant, and provides an indispensable guide to revising in every writing context. For anyone interested in revising, specifically at the sentence level.

Revising Prose

Revising Prose (5th Edition)

With a unique combination of alphabetical and descriptive lists, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms provides in one convenient, accessible volume all the rhetorical terms—mostly Greek and Latin—that students of Western literature and rhetoric are likely to come across in their reading or will find useful in their writing. The Second Edition of this widely used work offers new features that will make it even more useful: * A completely revised alphabetical listing that defines nearly 1,000 terms used by scholars of formal rhetoric from classical Greece to the present day * A revised system of cross-references between terms * Many new examples and new, extended entries for central terms * A revised Terms-by-Type listing to identify unknown terms * A new typographical design for easier access

A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms

An Anti-textbook

Style

Revising Business Prose

This highly acclaimed collection of author Richard Lanham's witty, provocative, and engaging essays surveys the effects of electronic text on the arts and letters. The author explores how electronic text fulfills the expressive agenda of twentieth-century visual art and music, revolutionizes the curriculum, democratizes the instruments of art, and poses anew the cultural accountability of humanism itself. Claiming that the move from book to screen gives cause for optimism, not despair, the author proclaims that "electronic expression has come not to destroy the Western arts but to fulfill them."

Democracy, Technology, and the Arts

The Electronic Word

The Revising Business Prose Self-Teaching Exercise Book

The Revising Prose Self-Teaching Exercise Book

As its title implies, this book deals with revising, not with original composition. In business writing, where a first draft often emerges quickly under the pressures of facts, figures, and deadlines, revision is typically the major part of a writing task, and collaborative revision often produces the final document. Revising Business Prose provides detailed revision guidance and a collaborative approach to writing easily applied to writing in business, industry, government, and academics. Based on the premise that bad writing in organizations imitates the bureaucratic style The Official Style, as it's called here this book shows readers how to transform stilted, dense prose into plain English. For anyone interested in the revision process in every business writing context.

Lanham's eight simple steps to clearer, more understandable writing will win you praise from bosses, colleagues, and clients. Voice; Business Prose; Professional Prose; Electronic Prose; General Interest; improving your writing.

"True to its title, Revising Prose is about revising, not about original composition. It will not teach you how to pray for inspiration, marshall your thoughts, or find the willpower to glue backside to chair. All writers face these dragons in their own idiosyncratic ways. But revision belongs to the public domain. Anyone can learn it. Revising Prose teaches you how, using a simple, rule-based, eight-step process called "The Paramedic Method" that concentrates on turning the bureaucratic official style so common today in business and government writing into plain English. Its focus on the individual sentence enables you to identify the surplus verbiage (what Lanham calls the Lard Factor) in an effort like this: The history of new regulatory provisions is that there is generally an immediate resistance to them. And turn it into this: People usually resist new regulations. A Lard Factor of 69%. Lanham's method aims to eliminate 50% from most writing, to create a sentence half as long and twice as strong. A saving of 50% in writing time, in reading time, in paper and screen space, in human patience and understanding-it all adds up to real money. It also adds up to a more persuasive and amiable presentation of self, as Revising Prose argues in its final chapter. "

A Quick and Easy Method for Turning Good Writing Into Great Writing

The Longman Guide to Revising Prose

Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy is one of the oddest comic novels in English literature. The Victorians were too morally earnest to see its meaning, while in our time critics have been too resolutely philosophical to grasp it. In contrast, Richard Lanham's introduction to Tristram Shandy combines clarity, wit, and grace. His account of the novel in terms of the simple pursuit of pleasure reveals historic and rhetorical models for the text while never straying from its playful spirit.

The Games of Pleasure

Tristram Shandy

Walter R. Davis

A Map of Arcadia: Sidney's Romance in Its Tradition

Sidney's Arcadia

If economics is about the allocation of resources, then what is the most precious resource in our new information economy? Certainly not information, for we are drowning in it. No, what we are short of is the attention to make sense of that information. With all the verve and erudition that have established his earlier books as classics, Richard A. Lanham here traces our epochal move from an economy of things and objects to an economy of attention. According to Lanham, the central commodity in our new age of information is not stuff but style, for style is what competes for our attention amidst the din and deluge of new media. In such a world, intellectual property will become more central to the economy than real property, while the arts and letters will grow to be more crucial than engineering, the physical sciences, and indeed economics as conventionally practiced. For Lanham, the arts and letters are the disciplines that study how human attention is allocated and how cultural capital is created and traded. In an economy of attention, style and substance change places. The new attention economy, therefore, will anoint a new set of moguls in the business world—not the CEOs or fund managers of yesteryear, but new masters of attention with a grounding in the humanities and liberal arts. Lanham’s The Electronic Word was one of the earliest and most influential books on new electronic culture. The Economics of Attention builds on the best insights of that seminal book to map the new frontier that information technologies have created.

Style and Substance in the Age of Information

The Economics of Attention

“A necessary manual for those interested in the perpetuation, and the possibilities, of good English prose.”—Harper’s Magazine “[Lanham’s] style is notable for its audacity, liveliness, and grace.”—The Times Literary Supplement “The most applicably provocative book on the subject of prose style available. Imperative reading for all teachers and students of writing.”—Choice This humorous and accessible classic on style calls for the return of wordplay and delight to writing instruction. Richard Lanham argues that many tomes on writing, with their trio of platitudes—clarity, plainness, sincerity—lie “upon the spirit like wet cardboard.” "People seldom write to be clear. They have designs on their fellow men. Pure prose is as rare as pure virtue, and for the same reasons…The Books [Lanham’s term for misguided composition textbooks], written for a man and world yet unfallen, depict a ludicrous process like this: 'I have an idea. I want to present this gift to my fellow man. I fix this thought clearly in mind. I follow the rules. Out comes a prose that gift-wraps thought in transparent paper.' If this sounds like a travesty, it’s because it is one. Yet it dominates prose instruction in America."—from Chapter 1

/U As its title implies, this book deals with revising, not with original composition. /U In business writing, where a first draft often emerges quickly under the pressures of facts, figures, and deadlines, revision is typically the major part of a writing task, and collaborative revision often produces the final document. Revising Business Prose/U provides detailed revision guidance and a collaborative approach to writing easily applied to writing in business, industry, government, and academics. Based on the premise that bad writing in organizations imitates the bureaucratic style The Official Style, as it's called here this book shows readers how to transform stilted, dense prose into plain English. /U For anyone interested in the revision process in every business writing context.

This software version of the second edition of A Handbook of Rhetorical Terms has revised alphabetical listing, 1000 terms of classical rhetoric, new examples and extended entries for central terms, and a revised system of cross-reference. The disk also includes audio pronunciation of key terms.

Richard A. Lanham

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