Revising Prose (5th Edition) [Paperback]

Richard A. Lanham (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 20, 2006 | ISBN-10: 0321441699 | ISBN-13: 978-0321441690 | Edition: 5

This remarkable little book, intended as a supplement for any course that requires writing, models a clear, step-by-step system for creating straight-forward, concise, intelligible and readable prose.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

As its title implies, this book deals with revising, not with original composition. Stressing the importance of the single sentence, The Paramedic Method of revision provides an easily learned method of revision to combat the obscurities of meaning that plague The Official Style, and demonstrates how to revise this stilted, dense prose into plain English. This book has been used with success wherever extensive writing is required, and also at every level of higher education.

Addresses the specific stylistic patterns that characterize most bad writing and gives an eight-step revision method called The Paramedic Method to break those patterns and improve writing. Helps with writing tasks in business, government, and the university, where The Official Style is rampant, and provides an indispensable guide to revising in every writing context.

For anyone interested in revising, specifically at the sentence level. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

University of California, Los Angeles

Product Details

• Paperback: 176 pages
• Publisher: Longman; 5 edition (July 20, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0321441699
• ISBN-13: 978-0321441690
• Product Dimensions: 5.4 x 0.4 x 8.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #63,636 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Richard A. Lanham: Life and Work

Education.

I went to the Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C., and to Yale University. After taking my A.B. degree in English from Yale, I served a two-year stint in the U.S.Army and then worked for the Smithsonian Institution in Washington before returning to Yale for my Ph.D. I began teaching at Dartmouth, moved to the English Department at UCLA in 1965, and remained there for the rest of my career.

Teaching.

My teaching life found its center in Chaucer, Shakespeare, and literary rhetoric from classical Greece to the present day. From my earliest days at Dartmouth, also, I took a keen interest in student writing. I taught composition courses both at Dartmouth and at UCLA, and in 1979 I started the UCLA Writing Programs. The Programs began with thirty full-time lecturers hired in a single year, and they developed a set of pioneering courses across the curriculum. Many of the lecturers in the Programs have gone on to distinguished teaching, administrative, and business careers, both at UCLA and elsewhere. I've told the story of this start-up adventure in a chapter of my Literacy and the Survival of Humanism.

Writing.

Where did my books come from? My scholarly career began with the Yale Press publication of my Ph.D. dissertation (Sidney's Original Arcadia) on rhetorical language in an Elizabethan prose romance. In my teaching I found that I was often using the Latin and Greek terms for rhetorical figures, and that students needed a guide to these terms. I started with a two-page list and this led to a longer list and finally to A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, which has been in print since 1967, in two editions, at the University of California Press. The book sets out the fundamental rules of formal rhetoric and has served many readers as an outline introduction to the subject.
From my interest in composition emerged a series of books and videos: Revising Prose, Revising Business Prose, The Revising Prose Video, The Revising Business Prose Video, Analyzing Prose, and Style: An Anti-Textbook.
From my literary teaching came: The Motives of Eloquence; Tristram Shandy: The Games of Pleasure; and a series of essays, Literacy and the Survival of Humanism, all of which explored the role of classical rhetoric in Western literature.
In the early 1980's, I became interested in how the written word was moving from the page to the computer screen, a transition I discussed in The Electronic Word. The volatility of the word on an electronic screen--its ability to move around, change shape, size, color, disappear and reappear, continually reach out to establish new connections--suggested different ways for writing to work, new ways that seemed to emerge spontaneously from an ever-changing medium.
This ever-changing electronic mixture led me to ponder spontaneous, emergent systems of order in other areas of life; biological evolution; its replication within computers--often called "artificial life"; problem-solving through computer-based evolution rather than propositional thinking; and, of course, the oldest of spontaneously evolving systems--markets. I pondered how classical rhetoric describes such a world in my The Economics of Attention, arguing that rhetoric supplied a fundamental economics for an information society such as ours. Published by the University of Chicago Press in 2006, it won the Media Ecology Association's Erving Goffman Award.

Visiting Appointments.

I have been an NEH Senior Fellow, a Senior Fellow in the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, Norman Freehling Visiting Professor at the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan, the 1994 International Scholar at the George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y., and, in 1995, the Andrew W. Mellon Professor at Tulane University. In 2001-02, as a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar, I lectured and met with students and faculty in two-day visits to nine U.S. college campuses

Recent assignments.

In 2010 I delivered the keynote address at the Council of Independent Colleges conference on how best to use the internet in undergraduate research. Also in 2010, I spoke at the Rochester Institute of Technology symposium on "The Future of Reading." And in March of 2012 I was a featured speaker at the Conference on College Composition and Communication.



Moonlight Job.

Since 1971, I have also acted as a literary consultant and expert witness in over sixty copyright cases in the television and motion picture business. I have worked on cases involving King Kong, Jaws, Shampoo, Earthquake, Star Wars, Superman, and many other films. My television credits in this line of endeavor include The A-Team and Falcon Crest. Most recently I acted as an expert witness in a case involving a PETA campaign.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

49 of 49 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Fast Method for Revising Good Writing into Great Writing March 12, 2010

By C. J. Singh

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

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Reviewed by C J Singh (Berkeley, California)

* * *

Years ago, I attended a weekend workshop for instructors of college composition that was led by Professor Richard Lanham, author of Revising Prose , visiting from UCLA, and Professor Joseph Williams, author of Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace , visiting from the University of Chicago. They presented witty and lucid summaries of their books, Lanham focusing on revising at the sentence level and Williams on paragraphs. Although their books have gone through several editions since, the core concepts remain the same. Both self-teaching books are on my amazon Listmania's list "Expository Writing: Top Ten Books."

In the preface to "Revising Prose (5th edition)" Lanham notes: "Writing may have been invented to keep bureaucratic accounts....As the world has become bureaucratized, so has its language....Revising Prose was written as a supplementary text for any course that requires writing. Because it addresses a single discrete style, "Revising Prose" can be rule-based to a degree that prose analysis rarely permits. This set of rules -- the Paramedic Method --in turn allows the book to be self-teaching."

In each of the five editions of "Revising Prose," Lanham added fresh examples and exercises to its core content: the Paramedic Method comprising eight steps as follows.

1. Circle the prepositions;
2. Circle the "is" forms;
3. Find the action;
4. Put this action in a simple (not compound) active verb;
5. Start fast - no slow windups;
6. Read the passage aloud with emphasis and feeling;
7. Write out each sentence on a blank screen or sheet of paper and mark off its basic rhythmic units with a "/";
8. Mark off sentence length with a "/."

Basically, Lanham's Paramedic Method advises you to delete prepositional phrases and "is" forms and replace them with active verbs.

Below are four brief examples and a test-yourself exercise from the book.

Original sentence: "Physical satisfaction is the most obvious of the consequences of premarital sex."
Revision: "Premarital sex satisfies!Obviously!" (page 3).
Instead of 12 words, 4. Lanham labels this achieved concision as the "Lard Factor." It's computed as the number of words in the original sentence minus the number of words in the revised sentence, divided by the original number of words. Here, the Lard Factor is: 12 minus 4, divided by 12 equals 0.66 or 66 percent.

Original sentence: "Perception is the process of extracting information from stimulation emanating from objects, places, and events in the world around us."
Revision: "Perception extracts information from the outside world" (page 8).
Instead of 21 words, 7. The original sentence has five prepositions, the revision just one -- preposition deletion ratio of 5 to 1. Lard Factor computes to 66 percent.

Original: "In light of the pervasive problem of overcrowding at UC Lone Pine, providing another coffee house on campus would offer the university's growing population some kind of compensatory convenience."
Revision: "Overcrowded UC Lone Pine needs another coffee house" (page 70).
Lard Factor: 75 percent

Original: "Hypertext was invented to facilitate the process of navigating through a presentation of interrelated topics." Revision: "Hypertext was invented to navigate through interrelated topics" (page 72).
Lard Factor: 55 percent

In this complete book, Lanham provides 35 exercises for the readers to try on their own. Let's pick one at random.

Exercise 14: Original: "The manner in which behavior first shown in a conflict situation may become fixed so that it persists after the conflict has passed is then discussed" (page 154).
My revision: Next, discussion proceeds to behavior persistence after conflict.
Instead of 26 words, 8.
Lard Factor: 70 percent.
If the original sentence comes from one or more authors, I'd revise it: Next, I/we discuss behavior persistence after conflict.
Lard Factor: 73 percent.
or: Next, I/we discuss post-conflict behavior persistence.
Lard Factor: 80 percent.
Try it. You'd probably do better than my quick efforts.

In "Revising Prose," his witty and blessedly brief book, Lanham gifts a five-star jewel to all expository writers.

[Addendum: Richard Lanham's also appears in a less expensive version Longman Guide to Revising Prose that reprints the 134-page main text. The excluded 30 pages comprise a brief glossary of grammatical terms and 35 exercises for the reader. Since the 35 exercises in the complete book do not present the author's solutions anyway, I suggest an easy procedure to make either version self-teaching as follows.

First, read the book through -- it won't take long; it's slim.
Second, note down on an index card each example of the flabby sentences in the main text that includes the author's solution.
Third, do each of these examples on your own and compare your solution with the author's.
(For my sample solution to one of the 35 exercises without the author's solution, take a look near the end of this review of the complete book.)]

30 of 34 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A fantastic book to improve your nonfiction prose writing February 16, 2000

By Evans Thompson

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

Take a deep breath, ignore the hefty price tag, and click Add to Cart. Lanham does a fantastic job providing simple techniques that allow anyone from the the casual writer to the technical writer streamline their prose to create clearer and more powerful sentences, paragraphs, and documents. As an English major, this book was by far the most helpful book I read to improve my writing.

19 of 21 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The best book about writing January 9, 2003

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

I first read this book in 1980 as a graduate student and it changed the way I write. I still remember the shock I felt then at learning that academic writing did not have to be tedious, wordy and stuffy. Everybody to whom I've given this book (back before it became so expensive)has also found that it radically changed their writing for the better.