Imagine the English language as a car that can keep its body and performance pristine if driven and maintained correctly.<\/p>\n
Think of nouns as the wheels that keep it rolling; adjectives as the chassis riding the wheels; adverbs as the paint job (some say the less flashy the better); and all other parts of speech (prepositions, conjunctions, etc.) as the vehicle’s other components (e.g., windows, trunk, mirrors, hood).<\/p>\n
That leaves us with verbs, which form both the engine and the steering wheel driving our language. Without them, our language, like a car, would sit still and take us nowhere.<\/p>\n
For this reason, verbs need tune-ups for optimal function. You can achieve this by tightening verb phrases.<\/p>\n
Opportunities to do so appear throughout our writing:<\/p>\n
Substitute a single word for \u201cis\u201d phrases that can be instantly shortened<\/strong>\u00a0 Instead of writing \u201che is in violation of,\u201d go with \u201che violates.\u201d Rather than express \u201cthe petition is a representation of the community\u2019s wishes,\u201d state \u201cthe petition represents \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n Pare verb-object phrases to the core verb <\/strong>\u00a0 Have you ever written that you \u201cmade the decision\u201d? \u201cI decided\u201d is leaner and so will use less gas in taking your sentence further more quickly. Perhaps you\u2019ve expressed in an e-mail that \u201cthe meeting came to a close\u201d and \u201call who attended took the matter into consideration.\u201d If so, next time you can adjust your linguistic belt a notch and write \u201cthe meeting ended\u201d and \u201call who attended considered the matter.\u201d<\/p>\n Delete redundant modifiers <\/strong>\u00a0 We don\u2019t need to write \u201choist up\u201d and \u201cplunge down\u201d when a simple \u201choist\u201d and \u201cplunge\u201d will do. Likewise, why use page space to say we \u201cmix together\u201d ingredients and \u201cmerge together\u201d documents? The careful writer confesses the two words just don\u2019t belong together. (These verb phrases also can be defined as tautologies; to learn more about this topic, review our recent article Striking the Surplus from Tautologies<\/a>.)<\/p>\n Choose the right verb to shorten an idea <\/strong>\u00a0 Did the book \u201cgive the people hope\u201d? You could write that it \u201cinspired\u201d them and buy room you might need elsewhere on your page. Someone sharing a passionate opinion might say a statement \u201cflies in the face of\u201d the facts. He could also state that it \u201ccounters,\u201d \u201ccontradicts,\u201d \u201crefutes\u201d or \u201copposes\u201d them and lessen the risk of flying spittle.<\/p>\n Use these techniques as your tools for your tune-ups. If you apply them often, you\u2019ll find out just how far and fast your writing can go.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Imagine the English language as a car that can keep its body and performance pristine if driven and maintained correctly. Think of nouns as the wheels that keep it rolling; adjectives as the chassis riding the wheels; adverbs as the paint job (some say the less flashy the better); and all other parts of speech […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2431","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-effective-writing","category-verbs"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2431"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2431"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2431\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2431"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2431"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2431"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}