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What it argues
Revising Prose is Richard Lanham's short, sharp guide to diagnosing and fixing bad writing. First published in 1979 and revised several times since, it targets the specific variety of bad writing that Lanham calls "the Official Style" — the verbose, passive, noun-heavy, verb-avoiding prose that accumulates in bureaucracies, universities, government agencies, and corporate offices. The book's argument is that most bad writing isn't bad because the writer is stupid or lazy; it's bad because the writer has absorbed a style that actively resists clarity.
The book's central tool is what Lanham calls the Paramedic Method — a step-by-step procedure for diagnosing and revising a sentence. The steps are: identify the prepositions, find the "is" forms, find the action, change the "to be" verb to a real action verb, move the actor to the subject position, and then cut what's left. The method is deliberately mechanical. Lanham's argument is that writers who can't see their own prose need an external algorithm to break the style's hold, and that repeated application of the Paramedic Method trains the eye to spot the problems without running through the steps.
What it gets right
- 1.
The Official Style is a recognizable register of bad prose: passive voice, abstract nouns where verbs would work, excessive prepositions, buried actors. It accumulates in institutions because it serves institutional purposes.
- 2.
The Paramedic Method gives writers a mechanical procedure for revising any sentence: find the prepositions, find the 'is' forms, identify the real action, make it the main verb, move the actor to the subject, cut what remains.
- 3.
Most bad prose buries the action in a noun. 'The implementation of the policy resulted in the reduction of costs' hides two verbs — implement, reduce — that would make the sentence shorter and clearer.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Richard A. Lanham is a Professor Emeritus of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he taught for thirty years. He is the author of numerous books on rhetoric and prose style, including A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, Style: An Anti-Textbook, and The Economics of Attention. Revising Prose, first published in 1979 and updated in multiple editions, became one of the most widely assigned writing guides in American universities. Lanham's work draws on classical rhetoric to address contemporary prose problems in business, government, and academic writing.
