Making Your Writing Sing

A short note on the power of verbs

Adjectives and adverbs are enemies, or so every writer is told. Kill them. They water down your work. They place too much burden on the reader to conjure an image of the thing you’re describing. They’re lazy. If that’s the case, what parts of speech should you be friendly with?

Nouns and verbs. 

I’ve spent the last few months obsessing over verbs. Dissatisfied with my writing, it was frustrating to not know what made it bland. During a workshop in September, I was happy to hear my former supervisor comment on my verbs. It was all I needed to see the problem that plagued my writing:

Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

George Orwell

Lane Greene in Writing With Style: The Economist Guide explains how this rule helps the reading experience: 

If readers find a familiar, overused phrase every sentence or so, their minds will wander. But if our writers arrest their attention by novelty of imagery, analogy and phrasing, reading our pages will be pleasurable, and they will read on.

When writers are asked to read to be better writers, it’s this kind of intentional thinking required. How are the different parts of the sentence contributing to my understanding of the topic? Is my mind wandering or am I totally engrossed? What is it about the writing that makes me want to do nothing else but keep on reading?

In the same book, Greene writes that verbs are supremely important, and too often neglected. Which is what had happened in my case.

As an experiment, I wore reader and writer shoes to note down verbs that seemed to uplift sentences from books and articles I enjoyed. As a writer, I could tell that the writer had intentionally chosen these verbs and that they performed a specific function in the sentence. As a reader, I felt this function in realtime: I saw what the writer wanted me to see without doing too much.

Here are a few from this Kara Swisher account of media's transformation.

1. As we noodled, we realized our first and best move was to use Walt's considerable clout to push the business leaders of the Journal to let us launch our new venture as an internal skunkworks.

2. Then he would saunter away from my desk with a jaunty wave. And while Graham was interested when I talked about what Newmark was doing, he laughed when I told him that Craigslist would wipe out his classifieds business.

3. The very worst thing that Graham - always apologetic for having interrupted me, as I strafed big retail advertisers in my stories about the sector's decline locally - would say to me was

My experience is a lesson on craft. No matter how good you become, you can’t afford to neglect the words that push your story forward. Obsess over parts of speech. Know the sauce — the formula — so you can blend them to your will.

Verbs are the heart of a sentence; they bring originality, precision and music to your work.

“If you kept your mind on the verbs, everything would fall into place around them.”

Hilary Mantel, author, in A Place of Great Safety

And the truth is, there’s always a stronger verb than verb and adjective combined. Stop looking at me angrily is terrible versus Stop glaring at me. Let your reader feel the anger instead. This also helps with shorter sentences. He put the room in order vs he organised the room. She opened the gate vs she flung the gate open. After a long dialogue, chances are she explained is better than she says. It does work vs it works. She made a plan vs She planned. 

I finally found a resource that explains it better.

Did you enjoy this short letter? Please share! Errors, as always, strictly mine.