Writing Guide #27
© 1982 by Ethel Grodzins Romm

A column on writing from Editor & Publisher April 3, 1982.

To be or not to be?

Why must vivid, vigorous verbs provide the strength in a sentence? Why can't nouns, adjectives, or adverbs do that job all the time, instead of rarely? What weakness lies in is, was and the other to be verbs?

No one known to me has the answer to these questions. I began asking them the day I wrote a verb lesson for a junior high grammar book. I had started with the usual definition:

A verb is a word that expresses action or otherwise helps to make a statement. What is the verb in the following sentence?
 
I heard an explosion.

Answering my own question with my definition led straight to explosion, the only "action" word in my sentence. How had I managed to get the kids to the noun instead of the verb?

The definition, like all definitions about language, misleads. Action can be put into one of four parts of speech, forming sentences with slightly different meanings:

Noun: I heard an explosion.
Adjective: I heard the exploding sound of dynamite.
Adverb: Explosively, the sound went off in my ear.
Verb: The sound exploded in my ear.
The sentence I heard an explosion would lead the students awry because I had written a talking sentence. Spoken English is marked by weak verbs and strong nouns: He took a walk. We had a swim. She gave a sigh. He made an examination. They reached a decision. (Evans and Evans, A Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage). In writing, we would edit those to He walked. We swam. She sighed. He examined. They decided. Evans and Evans, however, recommended against such editing. They erred. What works in speaking doesn't work in writing. My talking sentence had a flabby verb, heard and a vivid noun, explosion.

Since talking comes naturally and writing must be learned, we should scrutinize every verb in our copy, expecting they will always need changing.

Almost always, planting the action in the verb brings forth a more powerful sentence. We may never know why. I am guessing that a written sentence needs all the help it can get because it lacks most of the things that make oral language both easy to understand and convincing, things like tone of voice, emphasis, winking, sneering, jabbing fingers.

Writers have only the naked silent words on the page, all printed in the same shade of black. Perhaps the verb, the essential word in the predicate, provides the best location for the strongest action word, doubling the action power, rather like chocolate chocolate chip ice cream.

Every writer knows to avoid the be verbs, the weakest and flabbiest of them all. We say they "don't paint a picture."

To be comprises eight forms: be, is, am, are, was, were, being, been, as in:

I am good, he is good, we are good, she was good, we were good, we are/were good, we have/had been good, we want to be good.

Avoid all of them as main verbs. (In I am guessing, am becomes a helper or auxiliary verb, marking the tense, mode or voice.)

  • I wrote this column on strong verbs without using the verb to be as a main verb of my own. Good exercise -- you might want to try it when you are not writing against a deadline. But I could have used at least one is main verb. The hallmark of spoken English is the weak verb and the strong noun seems better to me than Spoken English is marked by....

  • Still, the writer's answer to Hamlet is: Not to be.

    Ethel Grodzins Romm is a writer and editor currently living in New York City. She is the author of The Open Conspiracy: What America's Angry Generation is Saying (review) (auction with cover), several of the Strategies in Reading workbook series and others. She appeared in the film Paranormal: Science or Pseudoscience? She has written columns on language for Editor & Publisher, The American Bar Association Journal and many others. She is currently working on a book on management.

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