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Why strengthen verbs?

As a writer, any sort of writer, you will want to be believed. To be believed, probably most important is a written tone that makes you sound as if you believe in yourself, in what you are saying. This confidence arises not from any breast-beating, but instead from the simplicity with which you make your statements and the apparent naturalness of your expression. One way for you to promote a natural tone in writing is to use powerful verbs; they lend to writing a forcefulness achievable in no other way.

We tend to speak with strong verbs, but for some reason, when writing, we almost automatically select the weaker forms. Strengthening verbs is a useful technical revision for two reasons:

  • You should strengthen the verbs for their own sake since strong verbs will lead to more believable prose.
  • If you are revising to strengthen your verbs, you'll be looking at the writing from a point of view abstracted from meaning. Attempting to change from a weaker to a stronger verb will involve a disturbance to your original text, a disturbance that may force you actually to reconsider your meaning, the very point of looking a second time. When writers look at verbs, they sometimes find only a few to fix, but during the looking, they discover places where their writing is wordy, unnatural, or poorly considered.

Newspaper reporters, who are paid to hold their readers' attention, are instructed to use eight out of ten concrete, active-voice verbs. On the other hand, business writers, who too often fail to consider the reader's time or interest, use sometimes as many as eight out of ten weak verbs.
Weak verbs come in two basic types: those failing to express the main action of the sentence and those weak because of the word order. The first are easier to understand, so let's deal with them first; they are linking verbs, expletives, and general-action verbs.

Courtesy of John Mercer Associates, www.MercerWriting.com

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