What is Revising Prose about?

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.

Lanham is a rhetorician rather than a journalist or novelist, and the book's examples come largely from academic and bureaucratic writing — the register most in need of intervention. He is merciless about prose that uses abstract nouns where verbs would do, that buries actors in passive constructions, and that multiplies prepositions as a substitute for thinking. He is also honest that the Official Style isn't random — it serves institutional purposes by distributing responsibility and obscuring agency, which is why it's so hard to eradicate.

The book is short by design — Lanham practices what he preaches — and densely useful. It can be read in two hours, but the Paramedic Method requires practice to internalize. The revision exercises Lanham includes throughout are worth doing rather than skipping. Revising Prose is not a general guide to writing well; it won't help with argument structure, voice, or narrative. But for the specific problem of overgrown, passive, noun-stuffed sentences, it is the most efficient diagnostic tool available.