Chapter 3 and 4: Be active in your verb choice
Chapter 3 - Active verbs power the narrative, describe internal thought in an immediate way, and add energy to your writing. I examined an article I wrote to persuade school librarians to make their libraries more boy-friendly. In a single paragraph, I counted 14 active verbs and 2 passive verbs. All those pushy verbs were intended to make the reader itchy and empowered to make some changes in their own libraries.
Chapter 4 gave me new information about the advantages of choosing passive verbs. I’d not considered they could be perfect choices when I wanted to show the subject as the receiver of the action. “The best writers make the best choices between active and passive.”
Exercise 1 asks us to read Orwell’s (author of Animal Farm), “Politics and the English Language” which he wrote in 1946. Find it at www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit
Here’s a quote from the end of the article that is very helpful:
Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one’s meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. Afterward one can choose — not simply accept — the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impressions one’s words are likely to make on another person. This last effort of the mind cuts out all stale or mixed images, all prefabricated phrases, needless repetitions, and humbug and vagueness generally. But one can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover most cases:
- Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
- Never use a long word where a short one will do.
- If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
- Never use the passive where you can use the active.
- Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
- Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
I didn’t have to go far to find examples of what Orwell laments in his essay. Here are a few:
DYING METAPHORS Orwell talks about the sloppy mixing or misquoting of hackneyed metaphors. On 60 Minutes tonight, one of the speakers said, “He was going to hell in a handbag.” The mental image, a misquote of “in a handbasket”, made me laugh. Imagine a person squeezing into a handbag—even if he weren’t headed for hell!
VERBAL FALSE LIMBS “The range of verbs is further cut down by means of the -ize and de- formations” I was reading an article by an associate professor of library and information science at Rutgers University. She seemed very well spoken and intelligent, but I mentally tripped over this paragraph lead: “The generalizability of this research is in its cumulative effect.”
PRETENTIOUS DICTION and MEANINGLESS WORDS These seem to be the requirements of most articles that I find in the journals of my profession—and probably of yours. They appear to be English, but are as indecipherable as the parody of Ecclesiastes that Orwell created for example. Unfortunately, Orwell’s points about how the English language “is in a bad way” is just as true 60 years later.
