Strong Verbs Add Zing to Your Writing

Colorful verbs convey images and add punch to your writing. Babies wail. Toddlers whine. Children fidget. Teenagers flirt. Hearts flutter. Later in life, traffic crawls, markets seize or melt and the right cars sip gas.

Colorful verbs can convey passion, outrage and a strong sense of right and wrong. In the Declaration of Independence, our founding fathers chose Biblical verbs to convey the depth of their oppression by the King of England: “He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.”  With verbs like that, who would doubt the justice of their cause? Or consider the Gettysburg address, in which Lincoln lamented that “we cannot dedicate . . . we cannot consecrate . . . we cannot hallow . . . this ground.”

Many of your favorite childhood friends also depended on strong verbs. Remember when the wild things “roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes?” Of course you remember. You remember so well that I don’t need to remind you that this passage comes from Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. Strong verbs cement themselves in your memory.

And there are descriptive verbs for every phase in your life, including your years practicing law. Legislation may falter in the House or sail through Congress. Plaintiffs malinger. Defendants plead. Witnesses mumble, squirm, and duck questions. Other questions elicit responses. Courts admonish. Companies don’t simply fail to disclose losses. They hide those losses. And those losses then propel companies into dangerous financial positions, where they teeter on the verge of bankruptcy.

Colorful verbs can bring passion to judicial opinions, as well. Consider Justice Stevens’s dissent in Citizens United. There, Stevens lamented that “the majority blazes through our precedents. . . .”  Citizens United v. Federal Election Com’n, 130 S. Ct. 876, 930 (2010) (Stevens dissenting).

Both life and the law happen in color so never settle for black and white verbs.

P.S. My book contains lots of strong verbs!

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