The Strong vs the Weak

In my writing critiques I often advise authors to use more strong, active verbs and fewer weak, passive verbs. Yet, when it comes to verbs, strong doesn’t actually mean active and weak doesn’t actually mean passive, even though that’s what they are often labeled today.

Starken und Schwachen Verben

When I was an undergrad I took three years of German. Since that was numerous decades ago, and I don’t know anyone who speaks Deutsch, I’ve lost most of what I learned. During my recent move I unearthed some old college books, among them a set of matching texts named “ABC der schwachen Verben” and “ABC der starken Verben.” I was pleased to find them because of all the clamor about needing to use “stronger” verbs in our prose.

The point I plan to make in this article involves a 30-second grammar review, so please bear with me: With “weak” verbs the stem vowel doesn’t change when forming the past and past participle tense; this includes verbs like “walk” and “add.” When you change the tense, walk becomes walked and add becomes added; the stem vowel remains the same.

Meanwhile “strong” verbs generally do have a change in the stem vowel when forming the past or past participle, like the verbs “blow” and “speak.” Blow becomes blew and speak becomes spoke.

This differs greatly from the definition of active and passive verbs. 

The Active vs the Passive

Active and Passive are “voices.” We identify the “voice” of a verb by identifying what happened in the sentence and who did it. It’s the difference between “The book was read by the student” and “The student read the book.”

The passive voice gets a bad rap for several reasons, including the fact that passive sentences are often ill-formed, confusing, and sloppy, plus they can be quite boring. On the other hand, sentences written with more verbs in the active voice tend to be more stimulating, exciting, even titillating, plus they generally hold the reader’s interest better than passive voice.

All of this I bring up to say that “strong” verbs can be in either active or passive voice depending on sentence structure and not the verb itself. So advising writers to use more “strong” verbs wouldn’t mean the same thing to everyone.

Now we come to the book that started me thinking about all of this. (That’s right; I don’t lead an exciting life.)

1,000 Strong Verbs

Last month I bought a self-published book titled: “1,000 Strong Verbs for Fiction Writers” by Valerie Howard. It’s a clever little book that should be required for most creative writers. Throughout the book the author heads a page with a common verb like “walk” or “ask” or “carry,” then fills the rest of the page with more exciting options. It’s like a thesaurus but a whole lot quicker. It can be a panacea for those moments when lines like “she broke the statue” is all our tired brains can come up with. We open this little reference book, find “break” and below it flows a list of visually appealing substitutes, like “shatter,” “mangle,” “rupture,” “flatten,” and “disfigure.”

Returning to a sentence I wrote in the first paragraph, now I question my use of “strong” when advising writers they’d be wise to increase their vocabulary because of their overuse of “weak” verbs. In grammar, at least many years ago, the terms “strong” and “weak” meant something quite different.

In Valerie’s introduction to her book, she writes that weak verbs are overused and don’t foster a powerful image, while strong verbs conjure an instant mental image, often accompanied by an emotion. I agree with her on this distinction but I’m still looking for different terms than “strong” and “weak” since grammar texts use those terms for how verb tenses are formed.

In the end maybe I’ll start a new trend by labeling the common, overused verbs “bland” and the more exciting, vivid verbs “rich.”  

“The worst thing in the world is to be bland.” ~ Ben Huh