Verb Verbiage

As a writer, it can sometimes be difficult to get your thoughts down on paper, much less stick to grammar rules along the way. Word choice, as described in a previous article, is essential to hooking the reader and keeping them reading. This is especially important when choosing your verbs.

Verbs are used to indicate what your subject is doing or experiencing. They show action, mental activities, and states of being. You could say verbs are more important than adjectives and adverbs. If you use strong verbs, you won’t need those filler words.

Rules to remember when using verbs:

Use strong verbs

Verbs move the story forward by creating vivid imagery and even conveying emotion. Using the right verbs can sometimes be challenging, but if you constantly use weak ones, your readership will suffer.

Look at the following examples:

• Emily sprinted down the street.
• Emily quickly ran down the street.

• The man burst into the room.
• The man walked fast as he entered the room.

The use of the words sprinted and burst present a much clearer picture of what the subject is doing and how they are doing it.

Subject-verb agreement

Along with choosing the correct verb, you also need to think about subject-verb agreement. Verb conjugation can be tricky, particularly with irregular verbs that do not follow the normal English patterns.

Examples:

• Incorrect-She seen the thief break into the house.
• Correct-She saw the thief break into the house.

• Incorrect-The Olympian swum across the channel in less than 8 hours.
• Correct-The Olympian swam across the channel in less than 8 hours.

Now, if I change the examples above to past perfect tense using the past participle “seen,” they would read like this:

• She had seen the thief breaking into the house.
• The Olympian had swum across the channel in less than 8 hours.

In all, there are five verb forms. It is crucial to ensure you are using the correct form so that your readers have a complete understanding of what is happening in a scene.

1. Base form is used for present tense and for commands.
2. (Simple) past tense indicates an action that has already happened.
3. Present participle is used in all perfect tenses and also when writing in passive voice.
4. Past participle ends in -ing and is used in past, present, and future progressive tenses to show that an action is currently happening (or has happened) over time.
5. Third-person singular present is used with all third-person singular nouns and pronouns, such as he, she and it.

Verb tense consistency

Remember, your work should consist of both short and long sentences to avoid monotony. Long sentences can provide a lot of information, but they can also cause you to mistakenly switch verb tenses.

A silly mistake could be look like this:

• Megan and Cindy went to the park, and they had played for three hours before going home.

As you can see, in the first part of the sentence, the verb is simple past tense, but in the second part, it changes to past participle.

It should look like this:

• Megan and Cindy went to the park and played for three hours before going home.

You MUST proofread your work, or you may find yourself making mistakes that you don’t want others to find. Many of these mistakes happen while you are revising and simply miss some of it. Unfortunately, the use of weak verbs, subjects and verbs that do not agree, or the changing of tenses will make you appear to be a sloppy author.

Go forth and conquer those verbs! Or should I say—master those verbs!

Heather Malone writes children’s books that focus mainly on Montessori education, special education, and nonfiction. She also dabbles in fiction. Her nonfiction book, Montessori from A to Z, was published in 2023, and her blog on homeschooling students with disabilities using the Montessori method can be viewed at spedmontessorisolutions.com. Her passion is education, which is evidenced by spending over twenty-five years in the field before leaving the classroom to now provide technical assistance to school districts. She lives with her husband and son in Ohio and enjoys traveling to new places in her free time.