How to Make Sure Your Readers Ignore Your Stuff: No Action Verbs, No Imagery

a “Verbal Knightcap” by Robert M. Knight, AIW Board Member

Don't bore your readers with pompous writing

One really great way to make your readers go away is to sneer at them, write pompously. Works every time; they will make a point of avoiding what you wrote. And one great way to write pompously is to drain the energy of your sentences with “being” verbs, like this:

I am hopeful that that solution to your predicament will be an effective resolution to your problem.

What is this writer trying to say? The sentence was in trouble even before it appeared on the screen.

Look at it. It starts with a being verb and a latinized adjective: “am hopeful.” The writer could easily have replaced it with the action verb “hope.” Then we have “that that.” Grammatically it’s all right, but it’s awkward. Then we read “will be an effective resolution to your problem.” What’s that clause doing there?

The writer can write the sentence much more clearly this way:

I hope that solves your problem.

Technically, action verbs and their opposites, being verbs, don’t exist. What writers informally call action verbs, grammarians divide into transitive verbs, which move the action from the subject to the object of the sentence, and intransitive verbs, which sounds active but has no object.

Transitive: He drove the car.

Intransitive: She swam.

What writers call being verbs, grammarians call linking verbs, because they link the subject with the object to describe a state of being.

You are beautiful.

For the practical writer, though, it is enough to know that action verbs do things, but being verbs simply are. Since action verbs add energy to sentences and being verbs usually sap sentences of energy, good writers prefer action verbs.

Being (or Linking) Verbs

Being verbs are, or they were, or they have been. But they simply won’t do. Here’s an example:

Major League Baseball was the first sports organization to institute the concept of free agency for its players.

Major League Baseball created free agency.

Action verbs serve no greater service to English than when they replace a noun, one that just sits there. In the next example, the verb “edits” takes the place of “the editor.” In the replacement process, we also manage to extract another freeloader, the preposition “of.”

He is the editor of two magazines.
He edits two magazines.

We can’t always depend on action verbs to eliminate words. Sometimes they actually add words but, as in the next example, allow a little paring later in the sentence.

Officials of the Air Line Pilots Association and United Airlines expressed satisfaction Friday with an almost unanimous vote by pilots in favor of a four-year wage agreement.

Officials of the Air Line Pilots Association and United Airlines said Friday they are satisfied by the pilots’ near-unanimous vote for a four-year wage agreement.

Some more examples:

She is a self-proclaimed renaissance woman.
She calls herself a renaissance woman.

Every year there is a race along the Inca Trail.
Each year a race takes place along the Inca Trail.

She is still in need of instruction and practice.
She still needs instruction and practice.

Creativity Killers?

Journalists and other nonfiction writers aren’t supposed to make things up, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be creative in the way they present their facts. And a slavish, literal adherence to rules like these can kill creativity.

Here’s how one of the 20th Century’s great wordsmiths, H.L. Mencken, put it in A Book of Prefaces for someone “with an ear for verbal delicacies” who searches “… painfully for the perfect word, and puts the way of saying a thing above the thing said —there is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.”

Such a dictum from a man whose fame derived from the way he wrote editorial columns — not unbiased reporting — might provide a quandary for nonfiction writers today. It would seem that content should reign, that the “thing said” should always outrank the “way of saying it.” But we can take some solace from the fact that rarely do the two collide.

Mencken — who admitted he was not a fair person — might simply be saying that writers should never get so picky with their content or their prose that they kill the great joy that can come from writing and discovering that they have indeed developed that elusive thing called style.

Few of the seemingly arcane rules of journalistic writing are so absolute that they cannot be ignored or broken. If you do break a rule, though, make it a conscious crime. Make sure you know why you’re doing it. One definition of professional non-fiction writers —or professional anythings— is that they know the rules well enough to know when to break them.

Next: An Appearance of Honesty

Robert M. Knight is author of Journalistic Writing: Building the Skills, Honing the Craft, to be released this spring by Marion Street Press. As a freelancer, Knight has written for more than 40 publications and news services. He began his career at United Press International and is a former senior editor and broadcast editor of the City News Bureau of Chicago and a former adjunct professor at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania and Northwestern University in Chicago and Evanston, Illinois.