Ises and ares and to bes.
Blech.
Weak verbs can make your writing boring and wordy. In one of my first agency positions after I graduated from college, my manager went so far as to call them “lazy.”
This same manager and her (sometimes) harsh feedback drove me to make changes in my writing style. But catching weak verbs before they come off the end of your fingers onto the screen or paper challenges even experienced writers.
I developed a trick that I used until I’d retrained my writing brain. My only tool? A highlighter.
- Take a printed copy of the assignment (work or school) and a highligher in your choice of color.
- Start at the top of the page and highlight every form of the verb “to be”: am, are, is, was, were, will be, has been, have been, had been, etc. Focus primarily on is, are, were.
- Work to change as many of the highlighted verbs as you can from weak verbs to active verbs. To be verbs do serve a purpose and it isn’t necessary to change every single one, but strong, active verbs should dominate your writing.
Some other tips:
- Use your imagination to substitute more interesting words.
- Don’t start sentences with “There is” or “There are.”
- Use the simple forms of your verb of choice (listens vs. is listening, for example).
- Embed the adjective before the noun you’re modifying rather than dragging the sentence out (brand-new baseball stadium vs. the baseball stadium, which is brand new).
Go forth and write well!
*note: you’ll only find one “to be” verb in this blog post. 🙂
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Comments
12 responses to “Eliminate Weak Verbs Once & For All”
“Its all in the verbs,” said a reporter friend-of-mine long ago. More highlighters are on my shopping list.
I wish MBA students were required to take a writing class! It's hard to get back into writing when you haven't done it for a few years. Keep posting writing tips, they are extremely helpful!
You provided some great tips. I will definitely try them the next time I write for both school and work.
I blogged about your post on my work's blog, http://prnonsense.marchpr.com/
Thanks Kelli!
Great topic — my tip for correcting passive voice is to identify why the sentence is passive.
Are you missing the actor? Example: "The blog was written" (by whom?)
Are you missing an action? Example: "The computer is new" (put "new" in front of "computer" and make a new sentence).
Another scenario is to have a "to be" verb followed by "ing" in which case you can remove the "to be" verb and the "ing." Example: "We are swimming" gets changed to "We swim."
I edit short business articles for a few newsletters and web site, you just described my nemesis. The articles invariably come to me in MS Word, so I use FIND to grab all the "to be" forms first and then work through cleaning. I go back and run my FIND again to ensure I didn't make the problem worse.
Nice tip – sure that I use lots of lazy verbs in my blog (probably a bit sharper in copy for clients – I hope).
Just found your blog and looking forward to following you.
Neil
Check out @kmatthews Eliminating Weak Verbs http://bit.ly/jPFHZ
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Eliminate Weak Verbs Once & For All http://viigo.im/0AyY
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
[…] came across a great blog post the other day, which we should all incorporate in to our writing— eliminating weak verbs, such as […]
[…] be or Not To Be I came across a great blog post the other day, which we should all incorporate in to our writing— eliminating weak verbs, such as […]
In every writing class I have taken, the teachers stress this point over and over. Using strong action verbs truly create clear copy.
I use the highlighter method, and it forces me to be more creative in my writing.
This is a great, straightforward way of making this point. Writing can be so much more energizing and alive if you follow there tips. And you make them easy to follow!