Richard Lanham

Richard Lanham reframed rhetoric for an information economy where attention, not content, is scarce. His prose-revision method (the paramedic method) is widely taught.

¶Core ideas

• Economics of attention: in an information glut, style is the technology that wins or loses readers
• Paramedic method: concrete, sentence-level revision steps to shorten and clarify
• Looking AT vs THROUGH style: rhetoric oscillates between transparent and opaque language

¶Key works

• Revising Prose (1979)
• The Electronic Word (1993)
• The Economics of Attention (2006)