Without verbs and their adjacent nouns and modifiers, we miss something.

They push the sentence forward and give it momentum.” In his book, On Writing Well, William Zinsser notes the power of verbs to move stories forward: “Verbs are the most important of all your tools. In its proper context, each one of these verbs grounds us as readers and propels us deeper into the story, evoking wonder and curiosity in their sounds as much as their meanings. For example, a chronological excerpt of a few verbs from my list, all from Marilynne Robinson’s novel Housekeeping, still communicates : swarm, buzz, trickle, melt, thaw, spill, bow, sweet, wave, recede, crumble, hoard, mirror, prowl, brim, seep, upend, swing, slosh. If you strip down a paragraph to just its verbs, you may miss some important details, but you can still grasp at least the tone and even the movement. I tend this list for a few reasons, but mostly because I’m a writer who believes verbs, when thoughtfully wielded and precisely placed, are the most important part of a sentence.Įven by themselves, verbs communicate. They’re verbs that stump me, woo me, and intrigue me, obliging me to run my fingers along their edges, a menagerie of action words, that crucial role in sharpening my view of their stories. They’re relics of my reading, souvenirs of indulgence in fiction. In my iPhone, hidden among the pre-packaged, processed verbiage of my text threads and emails, probably buried somewhere beneath the emoji, I keep an arsenal of verbs I stumble upon.

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