The Unparalleled Power of Verbs
In my new word game, Wordy, verbs outscore all other parts of speech
I’ve created a new word game for writers, to help you improve your craft through better application of the most important parts of speech. It’s called Wordy. Here are the rules:
Each player writes the best story they can.
Players get 7 points for nouns, because they’re vital to storytelling and there are often more of them at your disposal than you realize.
Adjectives get 2 points, because while they can enhance a passage, they’re easy to come up with and way overused.
All the little words like a, an, the, then and so on are dinged minus 0.1 points. You need them, but you should use no more than absolutely necessary. This negative incentive is intended to avoid overuse.
To-be and linking verbs get 3 points.
Powerful, active verbs score 10 points each.
Here’s why I created Wordy:
You need more and more powerful verbs in your writing, and less verbosity.
My trusty dusty guide to grammar and style, When Words Collide (Wadsworth Publishing, 1988), extols the virtue of verbs:
“Verb may mean ‘the word’ in Latin, but it stands for power. A verb is the engine of a sentence; without it, your carefully organized words stand still. A verb indicates action or being. As such, it is the only part of speech that can stand alone as a complete sentence.”
Cogitate!
In that briefest of complete sentences, I’ve given vital instructions (the subject is the understood pronoun you.)
Verbs don’t have to be so fancy or overly emphatic to lend power and substance to a sentence. Very mundane verbs pack plenty of punch. Paired with the right nouns, the perfect subjects and objects, verbs can tell an entire story, no adjectives needed, in one short sentence:
The astronauts zoomed past Mars as their landing thrusters failed and the last bit of fuel leaked into space.
Adjectives can make a story more compelling, when used judiciously, but adjectives are a writer’s crutches, pulled out whenever a passage seems to be hobbling along. Without verbs adjectives are useless, not to mention annoying. Hence just 2 points. Often adjectives just get in the way, as here:
The astronauts zoomed past ruddy Mars as their faulty landing thrusters failed and the last bit of fuel leaked into infinite space.
I mean, yuck. I just ruined the story. It was simple, elegant and complete before, if I do say so myself. Now it’s all writerly, its oomph lost in a dizzying display of adjectivery. In Wordy, if your opponent (or an editor) deems an adjective yucky, you lose 2 points.
Not all verbs are created equal, of course. To-be verbs do a great job indicating position: I was at home. Linking verbs indicate a state of being: I am crazy. We need these verbs, but they’ll show up in our writing without much conscious effort; that’s why they get only 3 points.
I’m releasing Wordy as an homage to William Strunk and E.B. White, who come as close as they ever do to waxing on about anything in the following passage in their seminal book, The Elements of Style:
Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs. The adjective hasn’t been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place… It is nouns and verbs, not their assistants, that give good writing its toughness and color.
Wordy winners—and I expect several of them on a regular basis—are determined by dividing each player’s total points by their story’s word count. That forces writers to make every word count.
Ready to play? You have the rules. Simply apply them to your next story. Readers will keep score and let you know if you’re a winner.
Cheers,
Rob
PS: I waxed on about the value of nouns this in a previous post, Show Me, Don’t Tell Me, which offers specific examples of the power of nouns, and points out how easily we can fail to include some that should be obvious.
What great advice.
I gotta tell you - the use of fluffy, multi-syllabic, and unnecessary adjectives makes my skin itch.
I recall a couple book club selections that required repeated doses of Claritin to complete.
Sorry needed more coffee. What a creative way to write about words!