Put Weight on Nouns and Verbs

“None of them knew the colour of the sky.” Stephen Crane opens “The Open Boat” (1897) with a sentence about something four men are not looking at, and the next one tells us where they are looking: “Their eyes glanced level, and were fastened upon the waves that swept toward them.” The paragraph never says the men are afraid. It gives us a sky nobody checks, eyes that are fastened, waves that sweep, and a horizon that, a few lines on, “narrowed and widened, and dipped and rose.” The nouns are the plainest available, sky, eyes, waves, horizon, rocks, and whatever frightens is in the verbs.

Drafts often lean on modifiers instead.

Sample (invented): The enormous waves moved very quickly toward the extremely frightened men.

“Moved very quickly” is “raced” in installments. “Enormous” gives a size without a measure. “Extremely frightened” asserts the very feeling the sentence ought to produce, and a reader told to be frightened may simply not be.

A reader seems to picture the subject, verb and object first and let modifiers adjust the picture afterward. When the verb is “was,” “made” or “took place,” or the action is buried in a noun (“made an attempt to” for “tried,” “gave consideration to” for “considered”), the sentence has no event to show, and the writer makes up for it with adjectives and adverbs. Joseph Williams and Joseph Bizup, in Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace, give two principles of clarity that point the same way: make main characters the subjects of sentences, and make important actions verbs.

Sample (invented): There was a tendency for the committee to make the decision in favor of delay.

The committee did the deciding and is hiding in a prepositional phrase, and the decision has become a noun.

“Then add texture deliberately” is not an instruction to delete modifiers. Even William Strunk’s 1918 rule, “Omit needless words,” says a sentence should contain no unnecessary words, as a drawing should have no unnecessary lines, and then, in the same paragraph, that this does not require all sentences to be short or details avoided, “but that every word tell.”

Dickens keeps his adjectives in the opening of Bleak House: “Implacable November weather,” and smoke that comes down “making a soft black drizzle.” Strip them and you have a weather report. The word “implacable” passes judgment on the weather as a thing that will not be moved, which no noun or verb in the paragraph could do. We take it to point ahead to the lawsuit the novel is about, which will not be moved either, though Dickens does not draw that link himself. “Soft black” holds a contradiction in two words, and the drizzle carries “flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes,” snow’s shape in the opposite color.

Practice. Copy one paragraph of your own, about a hundred and fifty words, from any kind of writing. Underline every verb. Circle each “to be,” “make,” “have,” “get” and “take,” and each noun that is really an action in disguise. For each circled word, ask who or what is doing something, and rewrite with the strongest verb that names it. Then go to the nouns: where you wrote “things,” “people,” “area” or “stuff,” put the particular noun. Only now reinstate modifiers, one at a time, keeping a modifier only if you can say what fact or judgment it adds. Compare the two versions aloud (Practice 57). Don’t count adjectives at the end; ask of each survivor whether it is doing work. Twenty-five minutes.