Ivor Armstrong Richards was born on the 26^th of Februrary 1893 in Cheshire England. As an educator, literary critic and rhetorician, he contributed to the foundations of the New Criticism, which emphasised the close reading of a literary text, especially in poetry. He initially studied history of Magdalene College in Cambridge but switched his focus to moral sciences and philosophy after he was introduced to C.K. Ogden by his advisor. Richards’ unique views on understanding and language perhaps derived from attending lectures, particularly on his disagreement with G.E. Moore on the matter of whether few people mean what they say or that no one could say what they meant.

Three years after he graduated with the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree, he once again met C.K. Ogden in 1918 and began to outline and co-author the book in which they were famous for, The Meaning of Meaning, which was published piecemeal in a quarterly journal that Ogden published as an aid to the war. In 1919, Richards was invited by Professor Mansfield Forbes of Clare College to give a lecture on the contemporary novel and the theory of criticism. Then was appointed as a lecturer in English and moral sciences at Magdalene College in 1922, co-authoring The Foundation of Aesthetics with James Woods and C.K. Ogden.

Richards and Ogden worked on Basic English, which was a collection of 850 words that covered the needs of everyday life in English. During their work, they realised that everything could be said with under one thousand words through the substitution of descriptive phrases for specific words. In this, Richards believed that Basic English could be used to teach English as a second language and spent several years in China trying to establish it as a standard teaching method.

In 1939, Richards was invited by Harvard University to direct the Commission of English Language Studies to produce Basic English textbooks and train teachers in the method of Basic English. The Rockefeller Foundation also awarded him a study grant to study cartooning and animation of Walt Disney Studios, where he developed a universal script which could express a variety of situations. In this time, he produced a lot of textbooks with Christine M. Gibson for teaching Basic English in a variety of languages.

Despite how useful Basic English was to teach English as a second language, it never became the standard teaching method in any part of the world. He began writing poetry at the age of sixty and died on the 7^th of September, 1979, but not before publishing several volumes.

His most famous publications include The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism and The Foundations of Aesthetics.