Good Writing

RULE 1:
Use Strong Verbs

Replace weak verbs, which are imprecise (walked, stood), with vivid verbs, which are specific (trudged, malingered).

Good old Sam Daleo. Sometimes this rule is expressed as Write with your verbs. Weak verbs are limp fish, sapped of energy by overuse: Walk, feel, think, dine, talk, tell, use, get-all colorless. "It felt bad to him" doesn't do much for the reader, nor does "He walked out of the house." Prosaic words, whether verbs or other parts of speech, leave readers unsteady about what is being conveyed. When I question my first bad attempt, more colorful actions-"His stomach churned" and "Rushing out of the house, he tripped on the last step"-magically appear.

Writing with strong, vivid verbs yields new sentence structures. It's not just bland to say, "He walked out of the house." It also doesn't lead anywhere much. But once I've got him "rushing," I imagine a consequence, the foot tripping on the last step, which gives me the puzzle of how to manage two verbs in one sentence. A more complicated but eminently readable sentence structure emerges. As I question my lackluster wordings and try new things out, my sentences mix up; some reel out longer while others sit boldly simple. The reader won't be lulled into a soporific monotony of one subject-verb-object sentence after another.

The more specific the verb, the less likely you'll need an adverb. "Raced" doesn't require "quickly." "Meandered" doesn't require "aimlessly."

By the way, don't confuse this rule with the unrelated grammatical distinction between "strong" (irregular) and "weak" (regular) verbs. Like any rule, you can take Use strong verbs too far. By avoiding the obvious verb "won," sportswriters imbue the victorious high school team with the courage and skill of Roman gladiators: The opponents typically have been slaughtered, massacred, blasted, blitzed, blown away, clobbered, thrashed, blanked, thumped, walloped, whomped, whipped, flattened, shellacked, crushed, hammered, shafted, or vanquished. Poor kids. Poor parents.

Anne's take:

A strong verb in a sentence instantly improves your writing. If no word springs to mind to vividly describe the action in your sentence, use your online thesaurus. Don't use "run" when you can use "sprint," "race," or "scurry." A verb describes what the subject of your sentence is doing: "The dog ate our Thanksgiving turkey." (This really happened ten years ago.) But Bodhi did not "eat" the turkey. He devoured, gobbled, wolfed down, and inhaled our Thanksgiving turkey. Bad dog.

"His grandfather sat on the porch, carving a figure out of a thick twig." OK, close your eyes and look at the screen on the backs of your eyelids. You see the old man-the noun-and what he is doing-the verb: carving something, holding it in one hand, slicing off thin layers of wood into a shape he has in his mind, to be revealed. But what if your sentence read "His grandfather slouched on the porch, whittling"?

Or "We tried to handle a week without Internet" could be "We hunkered down for a week without Internet." "Hunker" is a great verb. Try to use it more often. "The gorilla lowered her body to the ground" could also be "The gorilla hunkered down."

Here's another one: "She could not stop thinking about eating an entire chocolate cake." What about "She craved chocolate cake"? "Crave" is a great verb because it is so precise, so psycho-visual. You know that exact feeling when you've been in that state, longing for and obsessed with eating your body weight in cake, and then doing that-gobbling or devouring or wolfing it down. Cake is to me as turkey is to Bodhi.

Or "She went out to the garden and got a lot of vegetables for the meal she was cooking that night." Why not "She gathered vegetables for dinner"? "Gathered" rings with its suggestion of arms embracing lovely things-vegetables, flowers, little kids.

"Slouch," "whittle," "hunker", "crave", "gather"-these verbs are exact and rich. The reader immediately sees and understands the action you are describing-which could also be "The reader gets it."

Rule 2:
Question "Being"
and "Having"

The verbs "to be" and "to have" are the weakest of all; by nature static, they slow a narrative.

"To be" and "to have" aren't just overused; they're barely verbs. They suspend the sentence in an inert universe. Think of the sentence "I am ____." Whatever fills in the blank is fixed in place and time, frozen. "I am tired." "I am happy." "I am a teacher." "I am a jerk." The object of such a sentence characterizes you, or identifies you, or describes you. Most verbs move me along; "to be" keeps me in place. Any forward motion that the reader has been chasing slows to a full stop.

English reflects the odd behavior of "to be" by declaring that sometimes the nouns on either side of it can be both nominative, which means that they don't quite separate into subject and object. It's called the predicate nominative, which you don't need to remember. Lemon is a fruit. Shirley is a doctor. The sentence describes an equivalence rather than an action. Other languages reflect the outlying position of "to be" by ignoring it. In Sanskrit, if two nominative nouns appear without a verb, then "to be" is assumed. You don't have to bother to write it down to complete a Sanskrit sentence. This emphasizes how the idea of "being" lacks the typical propulsive energy of a verb.

Likewise "to have" does not describe an activity, but an acquisition that took place before the sentence began." I have three dollars." "I have a sister." "I have a basket of trouble." "I have" means that I already acquired the thing that I am naming. The thing is a possession, which is a little like an identity. If I think I own something, then I have stopped it in time as if it is neither in development nor in decay. Both of us-the reader and the object-are immobilized by the sentence.

Two exceptions to the questioning of "to be" and "to have" are common. One, they can be useful helper, or auxiliary, words, especially in constructing passive sentences. While "I was running to the store" might be replaced by "I ran to the store," you probably wouldn't want to turn "I am running for president" into "I run for president." Two, they can help me sound authoritative. In the next paragraph, I use a declarative sentence with the verb "to be"; "Becoming is an activity; being is static."

If you know a little about Hinduism, then it makes sense that Sanskrit has two verbs for "to be." One, "as, is nearly as static as the English "to be." But the other, bhu, carries a liveliness that often doesn't make it into English translations. When a form of bhu is used in the Hindu holy work the Bhagavad Gita, for instance, it implies "becoming" as well as "being." Becoming is an activity; being is static. Using bhu, "I am a man" has hidden in it the notion that "I am becoming a man," and probably "A man is becoming me," as if identities aren't resting places but developmental transitions. The language itself unfolds a distinctively non-Western notion of things in constant flux. English is not so subtle in its hidden metaphysics. We Westerners are confirmed materialists. Things "are," and what you see is what you get.

You might ask, "What about Hamlet's soliloquy?"

"To be or not to be, that is the question. Whether 'tis nobler . . ." The entire speech runs thirty-three lines. The first fourteen lines include nine occasions of the verb "to be." Hamlet punches it out almost exclusively with one- and two-syllable words. Then he makes a course correction. The final nineteen lines include one occasion of the verb "to be," and that one an auxiliary verb ("Is sicklied o'er . . ."). More three-syllable words appear. Hamlet's language rings with more authority, or ego, in the opening section than in the longer analysis of the situation, and that might remind the reader that a person of Hamlet's age is caught between the chop of childhood impulse and the gather of reflective adulthood.

Anne's take:

Yes, Neal is overeducated and a little woo-woo but he did not get the above distinction off a box of Celestial Seasonings tea: he got a master's in Eastern studies and had to learn Sanskrit during the first year of Covid. (He did not actually "learn" Sanskrit, per se, so much as study it online with twenty other masochists at his alma mater.)

What he is trying to say is that you can do better than "being" and "having." Question yourself each time you use either. See if you can find another verb that adds something to the sentence for us.

"I was tired" might become "I grew tired." Growing tired is active. "I was tired" is flat and, well, tired. That sentence needs a nap.

"I have some money" might become "I found some coins between the couch cushions," every child through history's main income stream. The new sentence blossoms specific and evocative. Or, in my case, "I took some cash from my husband's wallet." (We live in a community property state.)

Or "I pocketed some money by using coupons, while people in the express lane glared."

The great E. L. Doctorow wrote, "Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader-not the fact that it was raining, but the feeling of being rained upon." And as Neal said, "to be" and "to have" are static, which is OK when that is the condition of the subject. But part of good writing is teasing readers to want more, to keep turning the pages because the story and descriptions are alive, not passive or inert.

When you are finished with a section, take a break. Then go through your material again to see how often you've settled for what Neal calls "barely verbs." Pin each one to the corkboard of your mind and stare it down until an action word pops up that communicates something.

RULE 3:
Keep It Active

Pay attention to words that end in -ed or -en and are preceded by a form of "to be," and watch out for -ing endings; try flipping the sentence to get it more active.

The rule of thumb is to favor an active voice over a passive voice. In practice, this is thornier than grammarians would tell you. They stick to a view that -ed and -en verbs (and some others) preceded by an auxiliary verb are the culprits. As far as they go, this is true and worth examining. Watch what happens when a passive sentence is transfigured:

I was handcuffed by Jim.

Jim handcuffed me.

They were buried by the avalanche.

The avalanche buried them.

We know by ear which sounds stronger, or more appropriate. Musicians are said to play by ear or by reading scores. But they're always playing by ear. The discordant note, whether identified on a score or imagined as an interval in the mind, sounds the same. Symphony conductors don't instruct players on the score's notation; they conjure up scenes in the musicians' minds-a picnic on the rocks of a windswept beach, a falling-out with a close friend-and ask the players to translate scenic emotions into melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic sounds. By ear.

Trust your ear. But also use pointers-rules-to find fault and improve.

If the passive voice is inferior, why does it exist? Sometimes the passive voice is superior, and must be kept. Let's take our first example above. If the context is a detective untying Catherine, he might ask, "Who did this to you?" Catherine might answer, "I was brought here by Jules, but I was handcuffed by Jim." The correct usage of the passive voice is to put a special emphasis on the object of the sentence, usually the person or noun found at the end of the sentence. "Jules brought me here, but Jim handcuffed me" slightly deflates the word "handcuffed," and separates Jim as possibly the more culpable.

Generally, "My mother watched over me" is better than "I was watched over by my mother." But if I were distinguishing parents, and making the case that my father was neglectful, the second version might work.

Passive: "I was silenced not by the librarian, but by the person I had a crush on."

Active: "The librarian didn't silence me, but the person I had a crush on did."

The second version is weird. It doesn't work.

Grammarians distinguish the passive voice from verb forms that use participles. That's a fancy way of saying that -ing verbs are not considered passive. But often they might as well be, sounding flabby or inert. The -ing ending blows up a verb, allowing it to become a noun (swimming is fun), or an adjective (I put on my swimming cap), or part of a direct action (I'm swimming in childhood photographs), or-what we're talking about here-adding distance to the narrative, often implying a prior action the same way that the passive -ed and -en forms do.

We previously showed how "He is running for president" can't necessarily be replaced by "He runs for president." But that's the exception. Try these:

"He was running by the bank when the robbers emerged." Hmm, wonder what those guys are doing there?

"He ran by the bank. Right then, the robbers emerged." Oops! Wrong place to be.

The first has a singsong tone. By questioning the -ing verb, which is in all other ways appropriate, I'm led into a more staccato, direct, active phrasing, which adds tension and danger.

Anne's take:

You will note above that Neal says to be careful of verbs ending in -en, but then he forgot to mention any. When I thoughtfully pointed this out to him, he coughed up one: "The soufflé was eaten by the dog" versus "The dog ate the soufflé." I might add the backstory: "The eggs were beaten vigorously for the soufflé" versus "She beat the eggs vigorously for the soufflé."

These examples hardly matter-who even makes a soufflé anymore? But the point is that when the subject of the sentence receives the action instead of performing it, the sentence is weakened by your choice . . . Wait, wait. "The sentence is weakened" is in the passive voice. "You weaken the sentence" is better, although I do not want you to feel bad about this. Good writing is about taking each sentence and making it as strong and true as you can.

Of course, there are many circumstances in which the passive voice works. It is famously useful for those attempting to avoid responsibility for tragic decisions, as in "Mistakes were made."

You might legitimately backload a sentence to build up the drama, to pack a bigger punch. President Franklin Roosevelt used it at the start of his "Day of Infamy" speech: "Yesterday, December 7, 1941-a date which will live in infamy-the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan."