Helen Sword

Key principles in this chapter:

• Favour strong, specific, robust action verbs (scrutinise, dissect, recount, capture) over weak, vague, lazy ones (have, do, show).

• Limit your use of be-verbs (is, am, are, was, were, be, being, been)

Active verbs merit effort and attention for at least three reasons. First, they supply a sense of agency and urgency to your writing by telling you who did what to whom. A scientist’s passive locution, ‘The research was performed’, lacks the honesty and directness of ‘We performed the research’.

Second, active verbs add force and complexity to otherwise static sentences. When you write, ‘The pandemic swept through South America’, you implicitly liken the pandemic’s effect to that of a fire sweeping through a forest or a broom sweeping clear a cluttered floor. ‘The pandemic was very serious’ simply doesn’t spark our imagination in the same way.

Third, active verbs demand economy and precision, whereas be-verbs invite sloppy syntax. Consider this flaccid sentence by a philosophy student:

What is interesting about viruses is that their genetic stock is very meagre.

A light workout – including the addition of a stronger verb and a fresh adverb – renders the sentence at once stronger and livelier:

Viruses originate from a surprisingly meagre genetic stock.

Be-verbs become problematic only when we grow lazy: when is and are become the main staples of every sentence simply because we cannot be bothered to vary our verbs.

Active verbs fire our imagination by appealing directly to the human senses; they invite us to see, hear, touch, taste and smell objects and ideas, rather than merely letting them be.

Key principles in this chapter:

• Anchor abstract ideas in concrete language and images.

• Illustrate abstract concepts using real-life examples. (‘Show, don’t tell.’)

• Limit your use of abstract nouns, especially nominalisations (nouns that have been formed from verbs, adjectives or other nouns).

When you turn a verb into a noun by adding a suffix such as ment or tion (confine → confinement; reflect → reflection), you sap its core energy. Likewise, an abstract noun formed from an adjective (suspicious → suspiciousness) or a concrete noun (globe → globalisation) tends to lack substance and mass, like a marrowless bone. That’s why nouns created from other parts of speech, technically known as ‘nominalisations’, are colloquially called ‘zombie nouns’: they suck the lifeblood from potentially lively prose.16

Examples, analogies and metaphors ground abstract theories in the physical world

3.
Prepositional podge
Key principles in this chapter:

• Avoid using more than three prepositional phrases in a row (e.g. ‘in a letter to the author of a book about birds’) unless you do so to achieve a specific rhetorical effect.

• Vary your prepositions.

• As a general rule, do not allow a noun and its accompanying verb to become separated by more than about twelve words.