By Constance Hale
A writing guide that celebrates the endless pizzazz of verbs.Writers understand it instinctively: Verbs make a sentence zing. Grammar specialists agree: Drama in writing emerges from the interaction of a subject matter (noun) and a predicate (verb). Constance Hale, the best-selling writer of Sin and Syntax, zooms in at the colourful international of verbs. Synthesizing the pedagogical and the preferred, the scholarly and the scandalous, Hale combines the wit of invoice Bryson with the sensible knowledge of William Zinsser. She marches via linguistic historical past to color a layered photograph of our language—from prior to it particularly existed to the quirky usages we see on-line this day. She warns approximately behavior to prevent and conjures up with samples of really good writing. A veteran instructor, Hale supplies writing activates alongside the best way, assisting readers “try, do, write, play.” Vex, Hex, wreck, Smooch courses us to extra strong writing via demonstrating the right way to use nice verbs with kind.
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Additional resources for Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch: Let Verbs Power Your Writing
Sample text
We’ll start with the ever-evolving story of words, going as far back as the Swamp and as far forward as Squidoo. We’ll explore the sweep of the English language—and not just the standard brand. The Vex section of each chapter will take on the things that are oh so confusing about language, syntax, and verbs. This section might dip into linguistics, history, or geeky grammar, decoding it to help you understand our language in a way you didn’t before. Then we move on to the Hex section—putting a pox on false language pronouncements we’ve heard over and over.
But they don’t make for good writing. Don’t hide behind hazy nouns. Then there was the school principal nailed by William Zinsser, the author of On Writing Well. ” Joining the ranks of school bureaucrats and corporate flacks is an earnest manager at one of my favorite San Francisco restaurants. When it came to describing desserts, this gourmet loaded up nouns, but the surfeit of ingredients ended up signaling empty literary calories. ” Nouns smothering good verbs Given how deeply imprinted nouns are, it’s natural that we reach for them first—and furiously—when we are writing.
Were they using verbs? Well, they were probably uttering things, though not language as we know it today. A lot more than ape cries in the forest, though. Now things really start to zip along. The capacity for language is there. About 30,000 years ago, we began to scratch and paint shapes that resembled horses, fish, and hunters. The words for these would be nouns, but some linguists believe that sign language for ideas like “come here” and “stay away” might have come first. At some point, Homo sapiens (which literally means “wise man”) started putting sounds together with gestures, and then started replacing gestures with sound.