Use Strong Verbs and Nouns

If you’ve ever raised a teenager (or been one) you’ve probably experienced an eye-rolling conversation that goes something like this:

“How was the play—Our Town, right?”
“It was good.”
“What was good about it?”
“The acting.”
“What made the acting good?”
“The actors.”
“Okay,” you say, sighing. “What was the play about?”
“A town.”

Unfortunately, lots of writing with the specificity of teenaged conversation crosses my editing desk. One difference between mediocre writing and powerful writing is precision. Imprecise words equal lazy thinking. And lazy thinking creates dull, vague, and wordy writing.

Lazy thinking lacks visualization and a vibrant vocabulary. It pulls the covers over its head and evades clear commitment to an idea or evaluation. Most of us sleep in from time to time, writing words but meaning little. The ideas in our heads seem clear, but as in our dreams, many thoughts remain fuzzy and hidden from view. We think we have engaged with a solid reality, but when we wake up and try to articulate what happened, the dream disintegrates like mist. We have to learn and practice clear thinking.

Effective parents learn to phrase precise questions to get the answers they need from their children: “Which friends, exactly, are going to be at the movie with you?” (“Matthew, Andrew, and Anna”) rather than “Who are you going with?” (“some guys”). Effective writers avoid making their readers work as hard as parents; they interrogate their own thoughts and give clear meaning from the start.

Sharpen your pencil and your mind with these tips.

Use Active Verbs
Stative or linking verbs (am/is/are, become, seems) have their place grammatically, but most of us default to them much too often. Let them fly onto the paper or screen as you draft your thoughts, but then edit them out.

For instance, my original thoughts for the previous few sentences came out as the following common phrases:

Here are some ways to sharpen your pencil.
They become our default.
Let them fly when you are putting your thoughts on paper.

Note these quick formulas to flip linking verbs to active verbs as you edit:

1. Remove excess. You rarely need empty introduction words like “Here are some” or “These are.” Instead, grab nonfinite verbal ideas embedded in your sentences (“to sharpen” is an infinitive modifying “ways”) and turn them into main, finite verbs encouraging action: Sharpen your pencil.

2. Transform nouns and adjectives into verbs. You can do this easily by changing predicate nouns or adjectives to their verbal cognates: They are our default becomes We default.

3. Remove unneeded helping verbs. Generally, the “are” + “ing” verb form creates a progressive aspect. Occasionally we need to specify that as I was doing something, this other action happened. Otherwise, use the simple past, present, or future: when you put rather than when you are putting.

Use Precise and Relatable Vocabulary
Some writers seem to think that maintaining an average reading level means stripping all the vibrancy out of our vocabulary. They choose the most generic words to express their ideas and then try to add meaning by adding modifiers (adverbs and adjectives).

Others obfuscate by utilizing copious polysyllabic expressions, frequently eschewing lexicons and misapprehending denotation. [Translation: Others muddy meaning by using lots of big words, often avoiding dictionaries and making definition mistakes.]

And most of us default to phrasal verbs (verbs that require a preposition, like blow up) over verbs that stand on their own.

As you edit your first draft, look for all these ways to strengthen your verbs and nouns and remove adjectives and adverbs:

1) Choose a more specific noun or verb to replace modified nouns and verbs.

Went + fast = jogged or sprinted.
Said + angrily = spewed or shouted or blustered. (But use “said” most often for speech tags in dialogue. No one wants to read a whole page of “She spewed, she raged, she pandered” when they want to immerse in the drama of the story.)
Eat + messily = slurped or wolfed.
Obnoxious + thing = annoyance.
Comfortable + pants = jeans or leggings or chinos.
Family + car = minivan or sedan or SUV.

2) Pay attention to necessary modifiers versus redundant modifiers. We often write “wooden barrel” when, in context, people will generally visualize barrel as wooden. On the other hand, we must specify “gun barrel” or “barrel of the pen” unless the paragraph already points to a gun or pen.

3) Avoid the fancy utilize when the simple use communicates just as well.

4) Check your vocabulary accuracy often. Communication is complicated enough without poor wording. Do you know what you mean by what you say?

5) Avoid phrasal verbs if an appropriate stand-alone verb exists. Explode rather than blow up. Visit rather than call on. (But notice that in my introduction, I used the phrasal verb sleep in because I wanted to convey a favorite activity of teenagers rather than the negative, appointment-missing idea of oversleep.)

Consult dictionaries and thesauruses. Reduce your words to the best ones available. Make the effort to write more precisely, and you will revel in how effective writing trains you to think more clearly and vividly.