Richard A. Lanham is an American rhetorician at UCLA whose work on prose style developed systematic methods for revising wordy, bureaucratic writing.
Core ideas
- The Paramedic Method: Lanham’s most influential contribution — a step-by-step procedure for revising any sentence: circle the prepositions, find the action (often buried in a nominalization), turn it into a verb, find the agent, make it the subject, and cut the excess. The method treats revision as a learnable, repeatable skill rather than an intuitive art [@lanham2006].
- The Official Style: Lanham named the bureaucratic prose that dominates institutional writing — passive voice, nominalizations, prepositional chains, and hedging. The Official Style persists not because writers lack skill but because institutions reward the appearance of authority over actual clarity.
- The lard factor: the percentage of words in a passage that can be cut without losing meaning. Lanham used this metric to make revision concrete and measurable.
Notable works
- Revising Prose (1979; 5th ed. 2006)
- Analyzing Prose (1983; 2nd ed. 2003)
- The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information (2006)
Related
- Paramedic Method — the term entry for Lanham’s revision procedure
- Official Style — the term entry for the bureaucratic prose Lanham diagnosed
- Joseph Williams — a contemporary who developed complementary clarity principles from cognitive and linguistic rather than rhetorical foundations
- revision — the broader process the Paramedic Method serves
- plain language writing — the vault’s preference for active voice and concrete verbs reflects Lanham’s influence