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Invigorate Your Writing
Or animate, revitalise, vivify it with strong action verbs
Dear reader (and writer),
I love words. No, I adore and cherish words. I treasure new words that I find when reading. The dictionary and thesaurus are my friends.
Consider the age-old advice for writers of “show, don’t tell”. What does this mean from a grammatical perspective?
If you are writing a narrative, you will have characters that you want to describe, either their appearance or their actions. Perhaps you have a character who is feeling sad about some bad news that they’ve just heard. Here are two ways to describe it:
“That’s just terrible,” she said, sadly.
“That’s just terrible,” she breathed, her eyes blinking and brimming with tears.
What’s the key difference between the first and the second description? In the first, I have used a very boring verb (said) with a weak adverb (sadly). It tells the reader very literally what the character is doing but doesn’t give the reader any reason to be interested in the story. She’s sad, so what? However, in the second description, there are three stronger action verbs used to describe not only how the character spoke, but what she was doing, which shows the reader her sadness and creates interest.
