The University of Chicago Press

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    Key principles in this chapter:

    • Favour strong, specific, robust action verbs (scrutinise, dissect, recount, capture) over weak, vague, lazy ones (have, do, show).

    • Limit your use of be-verbs (is, am, are, was, were, be, being, been)
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    Active verbs merit effort and attention for at least three reasons. First, they supply a sense of agency and urgency to your writing by telling you who did what to whom. A scientist’s passive locution, ‘The research was performed’, lacks the honesty and directness of ‘We performed the research’.
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    Second, active verbs add force and complexity to otherwise static sentences. When you write, ‘The pandemic swept through South America’, you implicitly liken the pandemic’s effect to that of a fire sweeping through a forest or a broom sweeping clear a cluttered floor. ‘The pandemic was very serious’ simply doesn’t spark our imagination in the same way.
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    Third, active verbs demand economy and precision, whereas be-verbs invite sloppy syntax. Consider this flaccid sentence by a philosophy student:

    What is interesting about viruses is that their genetic stock is very meagre.

    A light workout – including the addition of a stronger verb and a fresh adverb – renders the sentence at once stronger and livelier:

    Viruses originate from a surprisingly meagre genetic stock.
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    Be-verbs become problematic only when we grow lazy: when is and are become the main staples of every sentence simply because we cannot be bothered to vary our verbs.
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    Active verbs fire our imagination by appealing directly to the human senses; they invite us to see, hear, touch, taste and smell objects and ideas, rather than merely letting them be.
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    Key principles in this chapter:

    • Anchor abstract ideas in concrete language and images.

    • Illustrate abstract concepts using real-life examples. (‘Show, don’t tell.’)

    • Limit your use of abstract nouns, especially nominalisations (nouns that have been formed from verbs, adjectives or other nouns).
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    When you turn a verb into a noun by adding a suffix such as ment or tion (confine → confinement; reflect → reflection), you sap its core energy. Likewise, an abstract noun formed from an adjective (suspicious → suspiciousness) or a concrete noun (globe → globalisation) tends to lack substance and mass, like a marrowless bone. That’s why nouns created from other parts of speech, technically known as ‘nominalisations’, are colloquially called ‘zombie nouns’: they suck the lifeblood from potentially lively prose.16
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    Examples, analogies and metaphors ground abstract theories in the physical world
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    3.
    Prepositional podge
    Key principles in this chapter:

    • Avoid using more than three prepositional phrases in a row (e.g. ‘in a letter to the author of a book about birds’) unless you do so to achieve a specific rhetorical effect.

    • Vary your prepositions.

    • As a general rule, do not allow a noun and its accompanying verb to become separated by more than about twelve words.
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