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Analyzing Prose. 2nd ed. Richard A. Lanham. London: Continuum, 2003.
DOI: 11.1177/1050651904269627
This second edition of Richard Lanham's 1983 textbook is again a valuable and practical aid in teaching prose style and analysis to students of the arts of language, whether literary, argumentative, or technical. Not as limited in scope as his Revising Prose (Scribner, 1979) or Revising Business Prose (Allyn & Bacon, 2000), this book teaches textual interpretation first and stylistic craftsmanship second, based on the belief that writers can better shape and control their own styles once they see how other writers pattern their prose to express meaning and to persuade. This knowledge of pattern and function cannot be imparted from decontextualized lists of stylistic figures but only from language in use. Consequently, in Analyzing Prose, Lanham teaches stylistic acumen by working through sample passages of effective and ineffective prose. These come from a number of prose genres-speeches, documents, essays, novels, and treatises-and from writers as diverse as Francis Bacon and Caroline Hennesy or Winston Churchill and Heinz Lichtenstein, MD, and from writing as diverse as the Bible and the Federal Register. In these analyses, Lanham uses variations in typography, spacing, and color to reveal the visual and aural analogues implicit in diction and syntax. The new edition retains the content of the first but enhances the visual representations of stylistic patterns through the use of color; features additional example analyses from a wider range of authors; and, in the new preface and epilogue, ties the book's discussion of style into the current issues concerning electronic text, information design, and media literacy.
Having found that a majority of student readers and writers fail to even notice, let alone describe, prose styles, Lanham wrote the book to remedy this deficiency. In the second edition, he laments that the deficiency is as prevalent today as it was 20 years ago. This blindness to prose style, he writes, results from two basic problems: first, the belief that prose should be transparent (as opposed to poetry, which calls attention to itself) to facilitate plain speaking and, second, the consequent lack of terms for describing what we do not see (i.e., what is transparent) (p. vii). Because style is not peripheral but integral to communication, however, prose...