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Style: An Anti-Textbook

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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.

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.

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.

I don't think much of the Robert Lanham's writing ability. I first read Revising Prose (5th Edition) and found it wanting, and I think this book is merely the proto-version of that book.

The problem, however, is that he has correct and useful insights into the problems of writing, and, in this book, the writing about writing. He has good things to say. He has good ideas. He just can't write convincingly. This book is the delight of the person who considers himself the thinking sort--everyone else is wrong and the system is rigged. The textbooks are written by hacks, published by bean counting idiots, and assigned by failed writers to cretins fulfilling general education requirements. The thinking person must endure all of this and copes by putting himself above the fray. If you liked Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong or A People's History of the United States (P.S.), you'll probably enjoy reading Lanham's evisceration of composition instruction. However, by the time you're in college, you should have already advanced as reader to questioning and evaluating sources, working with primary sources, and synthesizing ideas. The concept of a "textbook" at the college level is fundamentally wrong unless you think college is really just four more years of high school.

Lanham is no better than the textbooks he mocks (collectively as "The Books"). I knew this book was going pear-shaped even in its introduction when he asserted, to no good use, that America is the only nation that cares enough to teach its entire citizenry how to write. He has two unsupported and unbelievable suppositions there: that America is the only nation to do so, and that America is actually doing so. I don't think either are true. Even conceding that point, it's entirely irrelevant. There's no reason to assert anything about America. This isn't a book about post-industrial societies.

He then starts a story that leads to him writing this book. He writes "I was sitting in my office at UCLA one sunny spring day ...". Why does it matter what the weather was like? It has nothing to do with the story. It's trite. It's Snoopy typing out "It was a dark and stormy night". Furthermore, what does UCLA have to do with it? There's much he doesn't tell and assumes that we've picked up aside from what he tells us. Why shouldn't he start with "I had been teaching Freshman Composition at UCLA for ten years when ...". In Revising Prose (5th Edition), he goes on and on about the Lard Factor, the ratio of needless to useful words in a sentence. He's no better than the people he mocks, filling his pages with fluff.

After reading this book, I've come to think that Lanham is merely in love with words, which he'll freely admit, but a bit bewildered by sentences, paragraphs, and chapters. He has good insight, but can't express it. The person who most needs his insight is unlikely to tease it out of this book.

I really liked the idea behind this book, and I looked forward to seeing just what could fill an "anti-textbook." What I discovered was that this particular anti-textbook was filled with repetition and hatefulness. The author spends a lot of time attacking others (in very personal ways); this added nothing to his thesis and came over as sheer priggishness. He keeps on beating dead horses throughout the book, heaping scorn on pretty much everyone that is not Richard Lanham. One particul...more I really liked the idea behind this book, and I looked forward to seeing just what could fill an "anti-textbook." What I discovered was that this particular anti-textbook was filled with repetition and hatefulness. The author spends a lot of time attacking others (in very personal ways); this added nothing to his thesis and came over as sheer priggishness. He keeps on beating dead horses throughout the book, heaping scorn on pretty much everyone that is not Richard Lanham. One particularly ugly scene was where he tore apart an undergrad's letter to his school paper. Lanham's personal vitriol was out of proportion to the student's crimes against prose, and was rather bizarre(I was questioning the author's sanity actually).

I found it torturous to read, but kept plodding along in the hope that he might actually say SOMETHING about "style." In the end I don't think he said a single thing worth remembering. I suggest this as a book to avoid.

I was assigned to read this "anti-textbook" for a stylistics class, and frankly I found Lanham to be a total hypocrite. He preaches about the "sins" of textbook writers and how they pack information together and write boringly, yet I found his book extremely hard to get into for the very same reasons. His writing is dense and his points repetitive, and he spends his time using boring language to act like he's better than them. Now, I am not very fond of textbook publishers and their methods to rip off college students for every dime they've got, but the prose in their books isn't a huge problem for me. It's the money that is. Thank goodness for textbook rental.

There are some useful tips in here, but they're packed into all the hatred, hypocrisy, narcissism, and repetitiveness that Lanham is spewing, and they do not always come with examples. As my class's "discussions" of this book were mostly comprised of the professor yammering and nobody raising their hand when she asked a question, I can safely say that Lanham rubbed most of the students in my class the wrong way. I don't think I'm the only one in that group who thinks this way about him.

Anyone interested in the teaching of prose must hunt down a copy. This is Lanham's most eloquent and persuasive work.

Lanham, the true hedonist, even epicure, when it comes to prose (and probably other things), understands that the root of all art, all human expression, is based on pleasure, and he knows how pleasure is made through sequences of words. I love him for this. In writing--as in all art--we have to play with our raw materials, and, as Aristotle says, we play when we imitate, and then we learn things. Invoke the Sanskrit goddess of divine play, "Lila." Galumph, Galumph, Galumph! Lanham's got the groove, what else can be said?

Don't waste your money. Just some ramblings of a pompous professor who thinks he knows more than anyone else. Not much of value if you want insight on how to write. Try "Artful Sentences" by Virginia Tufte if you really want help.Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style