Richard A. Lanham (born 1936) is probably most widely known for his textbooks on revising prose to improve style and clarify thought. He is also a notable scholar of the history of rhetoric who has published notable books on the subject.
Lanham was educated at Sidwell Friends School and Yale University (A.B., M.A., Ph.D.). He is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles, and president of Rhetorica, Inc., a consulting firm. Lanham is a recognized expert in prose stylistics and Classical and Renaissance rhetoric. His Handlist of Rhetorical Terms (2nd ed., 1991) is the standard reference in the field, and he recently revised his Analyzing Prose (2nd ed., 2003), a benchmark work in stylistic analysis. Some other works are "The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance", Style: An Anti-Textbook, Literacy and the Survival of Humanism, and The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts (1995). His Revising Prose and Revising Business Prose—now in revision—remain popular. His latest work, The Economics of Attention, was published in 2006 by the University of Chicago Press.
Long a champion of Sophistic rhetoric as a challenge and counterweight to Aristotle's model of rhetoric, in recent years Lanham has become very interested in, and very knowledgeable about, multimedia and the implications for rhetoric in this age of electronic text.