The Paramedic Method is a step-by-step procedure for revising wordy, nominalized prose, developed by Richard Lanham in Revising Prose [@lanham2006]. It treats revision as a learnable, repeatable skill rather than an intuitive art.
The steps:
- Circle the prepositions.
- Circle the “is” forms (am, are, was, were, been, being).
- Find the action — often buried in a nominalization (“the implementation of” → “implement”; “the investigation of” → “investigate”).
- Put the action in a verb.
- Find the agent — who or what performs the action.
- Put the agent in the subject position.
- Cut the excess.
The method targets what Lanham called the Official Style — the passive, nominalized, hedged prose that dominates institutional writing. The Official Style persists not because writers lack skill but because institutions reward the appearance of authority over clarity. A sentence like “The implementation of the program was facilitated by the committee through the utilization of available resources” becomes “The committee implemented the program with available resources.”
Lanham used the lard factor — the percentage of words in a passage that can be cut without losing meaning — to make revision concrete. Typical institutional prose runs 50–70% lard.
The Paramedic Method operationalizes the same principles Joseph Williams described from a linguistic perspective: put characters in subjects and actions in verbs [@williams2006]. Where Williams explains why this works (readers process sentences by looking for agents and actions), Lanham provides a mechanical procedure for doing it.
Related terms
- revision — the broader process the Paramedic Method serves
- writer-based prose — the Paramedic Method transforms writer-based prose into reader-based prose at the sentence level
- readability — the Paramedic Method improves readability by reducing syntactic complexity