Richard Lanham

Richard A. Lanham is an American Professor Emeritus at UCLA and president of Rhetorica, Inc. Lanham, a rhetoric theoretician, prefers Sophist rhetoric to Aristotelian rhetoric and has an interest in multimedia rhetoric.

Lanham is noted for creating an easy-to-use method, the Paramedic Method, for allowing writers to make their compositions clear and concise.

The 4 rules are as follows:

• 1a Circle the Prepositions
• 1b Circle the "is" forms
• 2 Ask, "Where's the action?" "Who kicked who?"
• 3 Put this kicking action into a simple active verb.
• 4 Start fast, no slow windups. Ex. Avoid using "The point I'd like to make is...."

Main Publications

• A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms (1990)
• Analyzing Prose (1983)
• Literacy and the Survival of Humanism (1983)
• Longman Guide to Revising Prose : A Quick and Easy Method for Turning Good Writing into Great Writing (2006)
• Revising Business Prose (1981)
• Revising Prose (1979)
• Sidney's Arcadia: The Old Arcadia (1965)
• Style: An Anti-Textboo (1974)
• The Economics of Attention (2006)
• The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts (1993)
• The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissanse (1976)
• Tristram Shandy: The Games of Pleasure (1999)

References

LibraryofCongress.gov catalog [1]

Wikipedia.org [2]

UCLA directory [3]

Writer's Web, Making Sentences Clear and Concise [4]