Your verbs are more powerful than you think: Why thoughtful language matters even more today
More than simply expressing an action, verbs help to give life to speech and shape our perceptions. So use them wisely.
“If you need me,” said the server, handing out menus, “just ‘Hey, lady’ me.” I had just sat down in a busy diner in the mountains of North Carolina, a place where plainspoken friendliness is as common as bears in the backyard. Even so, this woman’s cheerful suggestion disarmed me. I liked her panache. She had flipped what is ordinarily a rude exclamation into a signal of warmth and subversive wit. She had made it a positive verb.
I have been thinking about the power of verbs as our language slips out of our control. AI slop and autocompleted sentences drain the life out of writing. Political speech floods us with crudeness and obfuscation. I’m American, so you’ll forgive me for claiming bragging rights to the worst of it all – the bizarre rants, threats and verbal chaos coming from our leaders in Washington.
To deepen our connections with one another, we need to spruce up our verbs. My encounter in the diner shows how reclaiming or creating vivid, active ones can be an act of humanity and resistance. Verbs are the engine of meaning. When we choose them with care, we improve communication, in speech or any kind of prose, in the workplace or the writing cave. For almost 30 years I was a dance critic and arts reporter for The Washington Post and relied on strong, dynamic verbs to tell stories and transmit the visceral excitement of the performing arts.
What I’m proposing here and in my recent book on the subject is the practice of thoughtful verb use. This is not a grand solution to impersonal and alienating language. Rather, it’s a discipline of small steps to add meaning, compassion and even joy to our discourse. Verbs are not only the secret soul of language. They are descriptive tools too. They spark imagery and emotion. One excellent verb can suggest a whole story. A jeweller’s website that I stumble across describes its turquoise as having “slipped from the sky”. An exaggeration, yes, but it conjures a harmless dream of magic and flight. A bus ad for a science museum in San Francisco urges, “Tinker, touch, test, experiment, notice, play!” And I’m hooked. I linger over “tinker” and “play” and see myself happily fiddling with levers and springs and possibly emerging from the gift shop with a deck of 3D cat cards and an ant farm.
Outside the creative sphere, strong verbs restore moral clarity. It takes humility to own the truth and say, “I made a mistake,” instead of, “Mistakes were made.” The passive voice sounds weak and evasive. Honesty lives in active, accurate verbs.
Yet the latter can feel risky when we’re accustomed to euphemisms. Corporate jargon turns “lay off” into odd nouns that hide the truth: “a simplified operating model”, “a strategic pivot”, “a rightsizing”.
Tell the plain truth in strong, clear verbs, however, and you can gain widespread praise. Airbnb’s CEO, Brian Chesky, discovered this in 2020. Facing the coronavirus pandemic’s chokehold on travel, he wrote a straightforward letter to employees. No doublespeak: nearly 1,900 of them “will have to leave Airbnb”. He chose blunt verbs and compassionate ones (“We will have to part with teammates who we love and value”). Chesky also stated his aim “to take care of those that are leaving”. Some responded on social media with gratitude for his manner and a tone so refreshing that the news media took note.
Verb choice shapes our relationships. In the 1960s, psychologist Marshall Rosenberg developed Nonviolent Communication, an influential training programme to foster empathy and avoid conflict. A key strategy is to make “I” statements with active verbs expressing specific observations, not generalities. “You’re always late for meetings” prompts defensiveness. “I noticed that you came in late twice last week” might invite a conversation.
“Honour the verb” is a cherished tenet of journalism: do so and you honour your audience. AI hasn’t learnt this. A self-described “book-marketing specialist” recently sent me a pitch via email, offering to promote my style guide on verbs in attention-grabbing ways. But they hid the point in bot-generated word sludge: “In reviewing the current presentation, I noticed opportunities where the emotional intelligence of the book could be reflected more intentionally across its discovery structure. That creates an unusual discoverability challenge…”
You bet it does.
Vague, maddening garbage such as this is spreading so quickly that you might fear that it’s unstoppable. But it’s not. Ignore the bloodless LLM rumble. Let’s slow down, consider what we mean to say and choose natural language with the clearest words – starting with a subject, a verb and the truth.
About the writer:
Sarah Kaufman is a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic, a writing teacher and the author of Verb Your Enthusiasm: How to Master the Art of the Verb and Transform Your Writing. Her work also appears in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post.
