Good Writing

Rule 1: Use Strong Verbs

Overview

This rule is about vitality in writing. Strong verbs—specific, vivid, active—replace weak, imprecise ones like "walked," "stood," "got," or "used." The difference isn't just stylistic; it's structural. A strong verb pulls the reader into the scene and often reshapes the entire sentence around it. The chapter makes clear that this isn't about showing off vocabulary; it's about precision and energy.

Weak vs. Strong: The Bare Minimum

The opening contrast is stark. "He walked out of the house" is flat, a dead end. But swap "walked" for "rushed" and suddenly the sentence has momentum—it practically demands a consequence, like tripping on the last step. That consequence forces a more complex sentence structure, mixing up the rhythm and keeping the reader from falling into a monotone subject-verb-object rut. The weak verb doesn't just sound dull; it limits what you can say next.

Adverbs Become Unnecessary

One of the most practical insights: the more specific the verb, the fewer adverbs you need. "Raced" doesn't need "quickly." "Meandered" doesn't need "aimlessly." The verb carries the full weight of the action by itself. This tightens prose and eliminates clutter—a double win.

The Danger of Overdoing It

The chapter includes a necessary warning. Take this rule too far and you get sportswriters who can't just say a team "won"—they've been slaughtered, massacred, blasted, blitzed, blown away, clobbered, thrashed, blanked, thumped, walloped, whomped, whipped, flattened, shellacked, crushed, hammered, shafted, or vanquished. The reader rolls their eyes. Strong verbs should clarify, not call attention to themselves. The rule is "use strong verbs," not "never use a weak verb."

Anne's Take: Seeing the Verb

The second half of the chapter adds a practical, almost tactile layer. She asks you to close your eyes and picture a sentence: "His grandfather sat on the porch, carving a figure out of a thick twig." You see the man, the motion, the knife. Now change it: "His grandfather slouched on the porch, whittling." Different image entirely. The verb is the picture.

She runs through a handful of transformative swaps:

• "We tried to handle a week without Internet" → "We hunkered down for a week without Internet." ("Hunker" is championed as a great verb.)
• "She could not stop thinking about eating an entire chocolate cake" → "She craved chocolate cake." ("Crave" is precise and psycho-visual.)
• "She went out to the garden and got a lot of vegetables" → "She gathered vegetables for dinner."

Each alternative is exact and rich. The reader instantly understands the action—not just what happened, but what it felt like. As Anne puts it, "The reader gets it."

Key Takeaways

• Strong verbs replace weak, imprecise ones to add energy and clarity.
• A vivid verb can reshape your sentence structure, breaking monotony.
• Specific verbs eliminate the need for most adverbs.
• Avoid the trap of over-glorifying action; don't make every victory a massacre.
• The best verbs are precise enough that the reader sees the action without explanation.

Rule 2: Question “Being” and “Having”

Overview

Two of the most common verbs in English—“to be” and “to have”—are barely verbs at all. They don’t move a story forward; they freeze it. When you say “I am tired” or “I have a car,” you’re describing a static state or a completed acquisition, not an action or a transformation. Good writing thrives on verbs that carry energy, that show change happening now rather than stillness. By questioning every use of “being” and “having,” you can unlock sentences that feel alive, specific, and evocative.

Why “To Be” and “To Have” Are Static

The verb “to be” creates what grammarians call a predicate nominative—an equivalence between two nouns: “Lemon is a fruit.” There’s no action, no movement, just a flat statement of identity or description. “I am happy” pins the speaker in place. Even other languages treat “to be” as an afterthought: Sanskrit can leave it out entirely, assuming it when two nominative nouns appear without a verb. Similarly, “to have” describes ownership that happened before the sentence began. “I have three dollars” tells you about a past acquisition, not an ongoing process. Both verbs rob the reader of propulsive energy.

Exceptions and Nuances

The chapter acknowledges two legitimate uses. First, “to be” and “to have” work well as auxiliary (helping) verbs, especially in passive constructions or progressive tenses: “I was running” can sometimes be replaced by “I ran,” but “I am running for president” sounds wrong if you drop the auxiliary. Second, they can lend authority to a statement. When the author writes “Becoming is an activity; being is static,” the “is” delivers a declarative punch that feels definitive.

The chapter also takes a famous example—Hamlet’s “To be or not to be”—and shows how the soliloquy itself moves away from static verbs. The first fourteen lines lean heavily on “to be,” with short, punchy words. The final nineteen lines shift: only one “to be” appears (and that as auxiliary), longer words emerge, and the language gains reflective weight. Hamlet’s youthful, chop-driven impulse transforms into something more analytical, mirroring the arc of the character.

The Sanskrit Perspective and Becoming

A surprising detour into Eastern philosophy reveals that Sanskrit has two verbs for “to be.” The first, as, is nearly as static as the English version. The second, bhu, carries a sense of “becoming” as well as “being.” When bhu appears in the Bhagavad Gita, “I am a man” implies “I am becoming a man” and even “A man is becoming me”—identities are not resting places but developmental transitions. The chapter uses this contrast to highlight how English, by contrast, defaults to a materialist, fixed view of reality. The author shares a personal anecdote: his friend Neal, an overeducated and admittedly “woo-woo” writer, studied Sanskrit during the first year of COVID (or tried to, online with twenty other masochists). The point isn’t to convert you, but to show that other languages offer a different, more fluid relationship to being—one you can approximate by choosing more active verbs.

Practical Advice: Question and Replace

The core instruction is simple but demanding: after you finish a section, go back and find every “to be” and “to have.” Pin each one to the corkboard of your mind and stare it down until an action verb emerges. “I was tired” becomes “I grew tired”—growing is active. “I have some money” becomes “I found coins between the couch cushions” or “I pocketed money by using coupons.” The new sentence blossoms with specificity and sensation. The chapter ends by quoting E. L. Doctorow: “Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader—not the fact that it was raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.” Static verbs tell facts; active verbs make us feel.

Key Takeaways

• “To be” and “to have” freeze a sentence in place; they signal identity or possession, not action.
• Replace them with verbs that show process, change, or sensory detail whenever possible.
• Exceptions: auxiliary uses (particularly for progressive tense) and authoritative declarative statements.
• Challenge yourself to spot every instance of these “barely verbs” during revision—and transform them into language that moves.

Rule 3: Keep It Active

Overview

The rule seems simple enough: use active voice. But as Neal points out right away, the grammar books make it sound more straightforward than it really is. The thumbrule of favoring active verbs is sound, but it’s the exceptions—the moments where passive pulls more weight—that make this rule worth wrestling with. A sentence like “I was handcuffed by Jim” is weaker than “Jim handcuffed me” until you imagine a detective untying Catherine and asking who did this. In that context, the passive version actually puts the emphasis where it belongs: on the object of the action, the person who suffered it. The same logic applies to “I was silenced not by the librarian, but by the person I had a crush on”—try flipping that into active voice and you get a clunky mess. So the lesson isn’t “never use passive,” but rather “pay attention every time you do.”

Why Passive Exists (and When It’s Right)

Passive voice isn’t a mistake; it’s a tool for emphasis. Neal walks through several examples where the object of the sentence deserves the spotlight. When President Roosevelt said “the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan,” he wasn’t being weak—he was deliberately centering the victims and the nation, not the attackers. The emphasis on the 2,400 citizens and personnel who died that day stirs the heart before moving to anger. Douglas Adams does something similar in the opening of The Restaurant at the End of the Universe: “In the beginning the Universe was created. This made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.” The passive voice here adds a wry, detached tone, as if the creation of the universe were just another mundane event. The fact that no one is named as the creator makes it more mysterious and quirky. So passive isn’t inherently wrong—it’s about knowing when it serves the story.

The -ing Trap

Neal also flags verbs ending in -ing, even though grammarians don’t classify them as passive. In practice, they often add the same kind of flab or distance. Compare “He was running by the bank when the robbers emerged” to “He ran by the bank. Right then, the robbers emerged.” The first version has a singsong, almost casual tone; the second feels immediate and tense, like the reader is right there. The -ing form can turn a direct action into something that seems like it’s happening in the background. That doesn’t mean you should never use it—sometimes you need the continuous aspect for timing or duration—but questioning every -ing verb will lead you toward tighter, more muscular phrasing.

Anne’s Interjection: The -en Verbs and the Real Point

Halfway through, Anne steps in with a gentle correction: Neal mentioned verbs ending in -en but forgot to give examples. She supplies two: “The soufflé was eaten by the dog” versus “The dog ate the soufflé,” and “The eggs were beaten vigorously for the soufflé” versus “She beat the eggs vigorously for the soufflé.” Her real message, though, is more important than the examples: when the subject receives the action instead of performing it, the sentence weakens—but don’t feel bad about that. Good writing is about taking each sentence and making it as strong and true as you can. Sometimes the passive voice works, as in “Mistakes were made,” which is famously useful for avoiding responsibility but also for packing a punch. The key is to notice it, question it, and decide.

Key Takeaways

• Favor active voice, but recognize that passive voice can be superior for emphasis, dramatic effect, or wry tone.
• Watch for -ed, -en, and -ing endings that may flatten your prose; ask whether flipping the sentence would add energy.
• Trust your ear, but use the rule as a pointer: if you spot a passive construction, consider whether the object of the sentence deserves the spotlight.
• Passive works when you want to center the recipient of an action (victims, the universe) rather than the doer.
• -ing verbs, while not technically passive, often create distance or a singsong rhythm; tightening them can increase tension and immediacy.

Rule 4: Stick with “Said”

Overview

Use the word “said” almost exclusively for dialogue attributions. The rule sounds boring, even lazy, but Neal and Anne make a strong case that it’s actually a sign of discipline and trust in your reader.

The core argument is that “said” is a mechanical function word—it’s not really a verb with meaning so much as a grammatical signal telling us who spoke. Readers skip right over it the same way they skip over prepositions. Synonyms like “chuckled,” “ranted,” or “explained” try to do the writer’s job of interpreting the tone for the reader, which often backfires by adding unnecessary drama or bias.

The Rationale Behind “Said”

Neal traces the rule to his newspaper training. If you pick up any front page, you’ll see “said” repeated endlessly, with no adverbs in sight. That’s because journalism aims for objectivity. Words like “claimed” inject the author’s skepticism; “argued” implies a defensive stance. Keeping everything to “said” strips away that subtle editorializing.

But the principle extends beyond news reporting. Even in fiction, where bias and interpretation are welcome, using “said” as a default is smart. It lets the dialogue itself carry the emotion. The reader gets to interpret how the character spoke, rather than having the writer spoon-feed them a tone. You can always reserve a more colorful attribution for a moment that truly needs it—but by default, trust the words.

The Anne–Neal Debate: When to Break the Rule

Anne pushes back, arguing that some synonyms are perfectly fine and even better than “said.” She names “whispered,” “mumbled,” “stated,” “announced,” “remarked,” and “observed.” “Whispered” does double duty, telling us both that the character spoke and that they were trying not to be overheard. “Mumbled” packs “said indistinctly” into one word without needing an adverb.

Neal’s response to her list? He called her a Philistine. (Anne notes they haven’t spoken since.) The humor here hides a real tension: where do you draw the line? Anne’s point is that a long stretch of dialogue gets staccato if you only use “he said / she said.” But she also agrees that landing on desperate synonyms like “asserted” or “contended” is worse than the repetition.

The practical takeaway from their exchange: avoid the truly egregious ones (especially “chuckled,” which Anne calls the worst of all), but don’t be a slave to the rule. Use “said” most of the time, and when you do deviate, make sure the verb earns its keep by adding genuine clarity, not just variety.

Key Takeaways

• “Said” is a functional word; readers register who spoke, not the verb itself.
• Synonyms like “claimed” or “argued” introduce author bias—use them deliberately, not as fillers.
• Avoid adverbs after attributions; let the dialogue show the tone.
• Reserve colorful attributions (“whispered,” “mumbled”) for moments where they add real meaning.
• A long stretch of “said” is okay; a desperate synonym is worse.