Liminal Wordsmith

I’m still working my way through Richard Lanham’s Style: An Anti-Textbook, but even from what I’ve read so far, it feels really different from any other textbook I’ve studied. Instead of handing out rules and “right” ways to write, Lanham treats style as something playful and rhetorical. It’s less about following steps and more about seeing how the way you write actually shapes the meaning itself.

That connects back to some of our earlier readings for me. McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage makes the point that the form is part of the message, and Lanham feels like he’s saying the same thing about writing. Hodgson’s Rhetoric and the New Aesthetic also comes to mind, since he pushes us to think about all the new ways rhetoric works in digital and visual forms.

Even though I’m not done with the book quite yet, I can already tell it’s meant to get me to think differently about writing. Instead of worrying about doing it “right,” I’m starting to notice how much style itself is the point.