The tradition is documented and blunt: Mark Twain, in an 1880 letter, advised that when in doubt about an adjective you should strike it out, and Stephen King's On Writing (2000) declares that the road to hell is paved with adverbs. Both rules are really one rule wearing two costumes — find the verb that does the work alone. English sentences carry their motion in verbs, and a page's energy is mostly a verb inventory: prose with strong verbs reads fast and physical; prose with weak verbs needs adverbs, adjectives, and constructions to simulate the force the verb declined to supply.
What makes a verb strong?
Specificity of action. "Went" is a corridor with forty doors; "bolted," "limped," and "drifted" are rooms. A strong verb encodes manner, intent, or consequence in a single word — it tells the reader how the action happened without decoration. The weak pair "walked quickly" spends an adverb to approximate "hurried" or "scurried"; "said angrily" spends one to approximate "snapped," and weaker still, it explains an emotion the right verb would have performed. The test is subtraction: delete the modifier and see what survives. If nothing survives, the verb was never carrying the sentence — the modifier was, and modifiers carry badly.
What are the standard weakeners?
Four patterns, in descending order of frequency. Adverb prosthetics: "moved slowly" for "inched." Nominalization: verbs frozen into nouns — "made a decision" for "decided," "conducted an examination" for "examined" — the bureaucratic habit Orwell attacked in "Politics and the English Language" (1946) under his rule to never use the passive where the active works, and its cousins. Static-verb scaffolding: sentences built on forms of "to be" plus participles — "she was running" for "she ran" — which add duration but subtract force. And filtration verbs: "she saw the door open," "he felt the cold arrive" — verbs that insert the perception between reader and event; the direct rendering ("the door opened," "cold arrived") puts the reader inside the head rather than watching it report.
Where do passive and continuous forms belong?
Where their properties are the point. The passive hides or foregrounds an actor deliberately — "the letter had been moved" is correct in a mystery whose actor is the question, dishonest in a memo covering one. The continuous genuinely conveys ongoing, interrupted, or simultaneous action — "she was reading when the bell rang" earns its length. The craft failure is not these forms but their default use: drafting by reflex rather than by choice. Strong-verb prose uses every construction actively, which is why the audit below reads for statistics, not prohibitions — a page with two deliberate passives is muscular; a page with eleven is drifting.
What does the verb audit look like?
- Circle every verb in two pages of your draft, including every auxiliary — was, had, been, got.
- List them in a column and mark each as action, static, or filtering.
- Count the statics and filterings. Above roughly a quarter of the column, the prose is running on scaffolding.
- For each weak entry, ask what actually happened and find the verb that names it — dictionary open, thesaurus checked for range and then distrusted for connotation.
- Reread the pages aloud: the difference arrives in the ears before it arrives on the page.
Are there verbs you should still distrust even when strong?
Yes — the overreachers. "Exploded," "slammed," and "seethed" lose force with repetition like anything loud, and a draft where every verb strains becomes its own monotone, the all-caps problem at the part of speech level. The corrective is placement: save the strongest verbs for the turns, as with sentence lengths, and let connective prose run on quieter ones. And thesaurus-verbs borrowed for their impressiveness rather than their precision — "ejaculated" for "said" being the historical embarrassment — read exactly like what they are. The goal is not exotic vocabulary; it is the ordinary verb chosen exactly.
How do verbs interact with voice and point of view?
More than any other word class. A character's diction lives in verbs — the nervous narrator's world "jitters, snags, hums," the weary one's "sags, settles, closes" — so verb choice is characterization performed continuously and invisibly. In close third, the verbs of perception belong to the viewpoint character's temperament, not the author's thesaurus; a blunt character bluntly perceives. When readers say a voice feels real, the verb column is usually where the reality is stored, and a revision pass that audits verbs for the character doing the perceiving is the fastest voice repair documented in workshop practice.
What does a before-and-after prove?
One sentence, revised the audit's way. Before: "She was making her way across the room in a slow, careful manner, and it was clear that she was in pain." Twenty-two words, four static or filtering constructions, two adverbs of manner, zero verbs of consequence. After: "She crossed the room in stages, favoring the left hip." Ten words, two action verbs, the pain performed rather than announced. Nothing was added — the revision is subtraction until one verb, "favoring," carries what the original spent a clause explaining. That ratio is the entire craft: every weak construction deleted pays a dividend somewhere else in the sentence, usually in speed.
Frequently asked questions
Should I cut every adverb?
No — cut the ones propping weak verbs. "She parked illegally" is fine; "she parked illegally and carelessly" is a style accident. The audit targets modification that replaces, rather than adjusts, the verb's work.
Is the passive voice always wrong?
No — it hides an actor deliberately or keeps the topic in topic position, both legitimate tools. Orwell's rule was conditional: never use the passive where the active works. Frequency is the tell — passives as choice read as control, passives as reflex read as fog.
What about dialogue verbs?
"Said" remains the invisible default and the strong verb the exception — the dialogue-verb rules covered elsewhere on this site. This piece's verbs are the narration's: the ones carrying the sentences around the talking.
Can a verb be too strong?
Yes — strain reads as strain. One "obliterated" per book lands; one per page numbs. Strong verbs at the turns, honest verbs in transit: the same scarcity logic that governs every loud effect in prose.
For more context, read How to Write Dialogue That Reads Like People.
For more context, read how to revise a novel.
For more context, read Controlling Pacing With Sentence Length.