42 of 45 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Counter-intuitive Masterpiece, July 31, 2003
By A Customer
Lanham, an expert on classical rhetoric, has written a witty, counter-intuitive work that argues, plausibly, that English teachers have erred in trying to instill clarity in their students' writings. What is needed, says Lanham, is to teach, not clarity, but delight--i.e., rhythm, euphony, word play, all the belletristic devices of classical rhetoric--before we can hope to see good writing in student compositions. Once students (and journalists and bureaucrats and everyone else) learn to enjoy writing as an aesthetic game, clarity will follow automatically. Teaching clarity divorced from delight is doomed to failure. Even if you don't agree with Lanham's argument, you will be thoroughly entertained and even usefully informed by his little essay.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
33 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Return to Rhetoric!, March 5, 2005
This book is brilliant. It's also quite funny. It's an argument for bringing back rhetoric, particularly the study of literary ornamentation, to transmute the leaden prose and confused thinking all around us nowadays. According to Lanham, preaching "scientific" notions of clarity won't cause students to write more clearly: it will only make matters worse. (Are you listening, Strunk & White?) We must turn the act of writing into an aesthetic game. Once we recover our sense of literary play, and not before then, our prose will improve. Some of the examples that Lanham uses are rather dated now--my goodness, how stale and silly all that hippie lingo sounds today!--but his advice is timeless.
Lanham occasionally overstates his case. This is often an effective pedagogical tactic. Although I think Lanham is mostly right about how to improve our prose, it's certainly possible to produce a gorgeous flow of words and still be a stranger to reason. (A little logic now and then is relished by the best of men.) I suppose there is a danger that some recalcitrant students will use Lanham's book as an excuse to avoid the hard work of thinking and writing clearly, just as some unimaginative grinds use Strunk & White's book to justify writing only the most ploddingly blunt and dessicated prose. Such are the hazards of pedagogy.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Still Fresh and Lively, March 21, 2010
This review is from: Style: An Anti-Textbook (Paperback)
Dr. Richard Lanham lays the blame for generations of tin-eared student writing squarely at the feet of textbooks that ignore how professional writers really work. By turning writing into a Puritanical duty, he says, "The Books" sap the joy out of language and reduce students to passivity. My experience as a teacher says he's probably correct. But the question of how to implement Lanham's enticing vision remains unanswered.
"The Books," Lanham says, exhort clarity without bothering to demonstrate it, and indeed, demonstrate the opposite. The Books discourage jargon, which Lanham demonstrates clearly has its place in academic discourse. The Books encourage students to "be themselves" at an age when they haven't yet discovered their identities. In other words, The Books demand what no student will ever be able to deliver.
Lanham proposes that the alternative is to return language instruction to the sense of play that once dominated. Language games and writing puzzles would rekindle the joy of language that most of us had as children, and lost in the bewildering factory that is school. Though I simplify Lanham's claims somewhat, his basic thesis is that students will only produce readable writing when they enjoy the act of writing itself.
Though I'm inclined to agree, after several years in the college composition class, I'm stymied as to how to apply his prescription. I have several sections of comp, each with over twenty students per class. And that's at the college level; in public schools, six or eight classes per day, often with over forty students, has become commonplace. Teachers don't have time to orchestrate or evaluate these learning games in our already overstuffed days.
This book is full of ideas that, though thirty-five years old, remain fresh and lively. It will surely generate many impassioned discussions among writing teachers, and among the more committed writing students. And if we take those discussions seriously, perhaps we'll solve the issue of how to instill a love of readable language. If you take this book as the start down that journey, you'll already be off on a good strong path.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
