Verbs Are Where Communication Actually Happens
Most people treat verbs as afterthoughts. They pick whatever conjugation fits the tense and move on. This produces sentences that are technically grammatical but structurally hollow. The reader finishes a paragraph without any real sense of who is doing what, when, and why. I edit documents for a living. Legal briefs, technical specs, project reports. Every single week I encounter the same pattern. A sentence that should take three seconds to read drags out to three lines because the writer buried the verb under three nouns. "There was a determination made regarding the feasibility" instead of "We assessed feasibility." The meaning hasn't changed. The cognitive load has.
Unlocking The Power Of Verbs The Secret To Effective Communication
Let's talk about the mechanics before the philosophy. Here's what actually distinguishes a weak verb from a strong one in practice. Weak verbs are the ones that have been nominalized — turned into nouns and propped up by auxiliary verbs. They require the reader to do extra work to recover the action. Strong verbs put the action directly on the subject. The first rule is brutal simplicity: eliminate every instance of is, are, was, were that isn't doing genuine copular work. These verbs show up everywhere. They connect a subject to a description, sure, but they also show up as hiding places for weak writing. When you strip them out, you force yourself to find the real verb that was supposed to be doing the job. A practical workflow for checking your verbs: run through your text once marking every verb. Then ask each one a simple question — is this the strongest possible verb for the situation? Not the fanciest. The strongest. "Utilize" is almost never stronger than "use." "Facilitate" is rarely better than "help." These are filler verbs dressed up in corporate language.
Why Writers Default To Weak Verbs
The instinct to nominalize comes from a place that makes sense. Formal writing rewards noun-heavy constructions. Academic papers, corporate memos, government forms — they all prize what sounds authoritative over what communicates clearly. Nominalizations sound weighty. "Implementation of the methodology" sounds like something serious people do in boardrooms. "We implemented the method" sounds like plain speech. Here's the thing that took me a while to accept: plain speech is usually the right call. The only time nominalizations serve a purpose is when the noun itself is the subject of discussion — legal definitions, technical specifications where precision matters more than flow. Even then, you can often restructure to keep the verb alive.
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A Specific Problem I Encountered
Last year I was reviewing a compliance document for a healthcare technology company. The entire procedural section was written in passive voice with nominalized verbs. Something like: "Administration of the pharmacological agent is undertaken by authorized personnel." Every sentence followed this pattern. The document needed to be clear for auditing purposes — auditors are humans who read fast and miss things. My workaround was to convert the entire section using a simple substitution table. I listed every nominalized verb and its direct equivalent. "Administration of" became "administering." "Is undertaken by" became "perform." The result was half the length, zero loss of precision, and every auditor I consulted later said it was the clearest compliance document they'd reviewed that quarter. That specific transformation cut the document from 47 pages to 24.
Counter-Intuitive Points Beginners Miss
Strong verbs aren't always dramatic verbs. "Constitutes" is a strong verb. So is "yields." These are boring on the surface but carry exact technical meaning that flashy alternatives lose. When a researcher writes that data "yields" a particular result, they mean something very specific. If you replace it with "gives us", you've stripped precision for colloquial comfort. Another missed point: strong verbs create rhythm. A paragraph with varied verb strength reads differently than one where every verb sits at the same energy level. Think of it like punctuation — you need some moments of intensity and some moments of calm. A paragraph where every sentence uses a punchy verb becomes exhausting. A paragraph where every sentence uses a weak verb becomes invisible. The mix matters. Transitive versus intransitive usage is another area where most people don't think consciously. Transitive verbs (those that take a direct object) create clearer causal relationships. "The system crashed" is intransitive — something happened but the mechanism is unclear. "The system crash halted operations" is transitive — now we know exactly what the crash affected. In technical and instructional writing, transitive constructions are almost always preferable because they leave no ambiguity about what acts on what.
When This Approach Fails
Verb strength doesn't solve every communication problem. There are contexts where nominalizations are genuinely required. Patent language demands them — you can't write a patent claim in active voice and maintain the legal scope you need. Legal contracts also rely heavily on nominalized structures for a reason: they create distance between the actor and the action, which is sometimes the whole point when you're allocating liability. Non-native writers face a specific challenge here. The nominalization patterns of their first language may differ significantly from English. Forcing verb strength improvements onto someone who is already managing complex grammar can introduce errors. In those cases, focus on clarity first, verb strength second. Getting the meaning across accurately matters more than making the prose punchy. Highly regulated industries like pharmaceuticals and aviation sometimes mandate specific verb forms in their documentation standards. You will fight institutional resistance if you try to strengthen verbs in those environments. The workaround is to work within the mandated structure and strengthen verbs only where the guidelines allow flexibility — usually in explanatory sections, summaries, and internal communications.
Advanced Technique: Verb Stacking
There's a technique I picked up from copy editors that most people have never heard of. It's called verb stacking, and it's useful for dense technical writing. Instead of one weak verb carrying a nominalized action, you split it across two strong verbs that each do real work. Compare: "The organization provided guidance on the implementation of updated protocols." versus "The organization guided the team through implementing the updated protocols." Both sentences communicate the same core information. The second version uses stronger verbs throughout and removes the nominalized nouns that create distance between the reader and the action. This technique requires practice. The first few attempts will feel forced. You'll catch yourself reaching for "implement" when "carry out" would work better, or vice versa. The trick is to read the sentence aloud after each revision. If it sounds like something a person would actually say in conversation while maintaining the precision of the original, you've landed it.
Quick Reference: Common Weak-to-Strong Pairs
Made accomplished or achieved
Provided supplied or delivered
Conducted ran or executed
Performed did or carried out
Assisted helped or supported
Initiated started or launched
Evaluated assessed or judged
Determined decided or concluded
Investigated examined or explored
Developed built or created None of these are automatic substitutions. Context determines the right choice. "Conducted an investigation" might actually be the stronger phrasing in a formal report where "investigated" feels too casual for the register. Read the surrounding text before swapping. The goal is precision, not uniformity.
Measuring Your Progress
A practical test for whether your verb work is effective: show a revised paragraph to someone unfamiliar with the topic. If they can tell you who did what within the first reading, your verbs are doing their job. If they have to re-read to parse the sentence structure, go back and find the weak verbs. They're always there. For technical documents specifically, I use a reading-time benchmark. A paragraph that takes longer than twelve seconds to read on first encounter usually contains at least one nominalized verb cluster that needs collapsing. This isn't a hard rule — complex topics naturally require more words — but it's a reliable signal that something in the sentence architecture needs attention.
