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Richard Lanham

Writing and thinking
A literature professor who graded his students' papers himself, Richard Lanham was so disturbed by students' poor writing that he put that career aside to start and run a writing program at UCLA.

"I thought that student writing was terribly important," he says. "I thought that if they didn't know how to write, we hadn't succeeded in teaching them how to think."

From Revising Prose
"From now on, graphics will be part of a writer¹s basic training. Words and images are now inextricably intertwined in our common expressive repertoire."

Bio
To treat your sick prose, apply the Paramedic Method

Richard Lanham
From 1965 to 1994 Richard A. Lanham taught in the English Department of the University of California, Los Angeles, where he is now professor emeritus. He is the president of Rhetorica, Inc., a consulting and editorial services company.

Although his teaching career found its center in Chaucer, Shakespeare and literary rhetoric, he founded the UCLA Writing Program and directed it from 1979 to 1986. Recently Allyn & Bacon published new editions (the fourth) of his two composition textbooks, Revising Prose and Revising Business Prose.

Rhetorica produces an accompanying video and interactive exercises to go with each book.

Prof. Lanham has written several books of literary criticism and prose stylistics. His latest book, The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts, was published, in both printed and electronic form, by the University of Chicago Press in 1993. To read an excerpt, go to http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/jod/texts/lanham.sample.

Since 1971, Prof. Lanham has acted as a literary consultant and expert witness in copyright disputes, working on cases involving such films and television shows as King Kong, Jaws, Shampoo, Star Wars, The A-Team and Falcon Crest.

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