Verb Your Enthusiasm: How to Master the Art of the Verb and Transform Your Writing - Hardcover

Kaufman, Sarah L.

 
9780593831465: Verb Your Enthusiasm: How to Master the Art of the Verb and Transform Your Writing
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0593831462 ISBN 13: 9780593831465
Verlag: Penguin Press, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

“Personable, smart, and, yes, enthusiastic… a masterclass you can take at your own pace.” – Ron Charles

“This verb-filled outing reads like a dream.” – Publishers Weekly (starred)

“An almost shockingly adroit guide to how to make every word count.” —Benjamin Dreyer, author of the New York Times bestseller Dreyer's English

An elegant guide to the promise, power, and poetry of verbs, from Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Sarah L. Kaufman

Verbs are the underrated stars of the English language. They hold it all together. A complete sentence cannot exist without one, yet a single verb can create complete meaning. (See?) In this brilliant exploration of language, grammar, and style, Sarah L. Kaufman illuminates how all of us, professional writers and novices alike, can master the art of the verb and unlock the infinite potential of written expression.

When she was the dance critic at The Washington Post, Kaufman was challenged to translate the dynamic language of movement into words. Verbs showed her the way. Good verbs power great storytelling; they leap off the page, fire our senses, and transform our perceptions.

Verb Your Enthusiasm is a clarion call for all of us to get back to basics: to mean what we say, and say what we mean. Across eleven chapters, Kaufman proves how strong verbs can make your own writing—be it an email, a text, a report, or an ad—more efficient and effective, and investigates theories of language that will change how you read and write. But this isn’t a grammar guide, and it surely isn’t a set of rules. Great writing comes from a mix of inspiration, passion, and intelligence—from your unique discernment and imagination. Searching for the right verb might even reveal something true about yourself. All that in a word. So go. Write. Verb.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Sarah L. Kaufman is a Pulitzer Prize–winning critic, an author, and a writing teacher. As The Washington Post's chief dance critic and senior arts reporter, she focused on the union of art and everyday living. Her work has also appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Review of Books, and The Boston Globe. She was a 2024 Penn State Foster-Foreman Distinguished Writer and has received journalism fellowships from the Nieman Foundation and the French-American Foundation. Her debut book, The Art of Grace, was a Washington Post notable book and won the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award and a Spirituality & Practice Award. A former McGraw Professor of Writing at Princeton University, Kaufman has also taught at Harvard University, American University, and the National Critics Institute. She lives in Asheville, North Carolina.

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Chapter 1

Energize

Discover why verbs are the secret superpower of language. Learn how precise, dynamic verbs add muscle, clarity, passion, and truth.

As soon as Kira caught sight of him, she leaped for the door and zoomed out-like a rocket! Whoosh!

-Winifred and Cecil Lubell

Propped near my desk sits the first book I ever devoured cover to cover. Truly devoured; several pages bear marks of my early habit of chewing on the corners. I'm sentimental about such things. When I was in kindergarten, I read this slender book, titled Up a Tree, to my classmates, with the teacher holding it for me, the page-turner to my little étude. I was a shy child who avoided drawing attention; still, I'd never felt so confident as I did that day, holding forth on the antics of a cat named Kira. The book describes her outdoor adventure that begins when a neighbor's dog bursts into the house, and Kira zooms out her little cat door with the dog racing after her.

My five-year-old psyche zoomed with her. That instant escape thrilled me-it still does, to be honest. Up a Tree, by artist and writer Winifred Lubell and her husband, Cecil, a literary scholar, brims with bright, vigorous verbs: chased, dashed, rushing, running, "yowling her head off." Of course, as a children's book it's striving to keep beginning readers' attention, and the upbeat action helps. I like to think the fast-paced narrative ignited my passion for capturing action in words.

That's what Verb Your Enthusiasm is about, in a nutshell: learning to express action and change, whether bold or quiet, on the page.

I have relied on the power of verbs every day of my career. I started out as a copy editor for various newspapers, fixing blundered syntax and writing verb-centered headlines. On the race-day status of a horse with hives: "Rash May Scratch Alysheba." (Two thoughts spring to mind: That example dates me. And we all could have wept when the edict came down to stop punning the headlines.)

Eventually I landed at The Washington Post and shifted to writing. I poured years of ballet and tap lessons and everything I'd learned from a college job at a ballet school into nearly three decades as a dance critic. Night after night I had the world's best sight lines onto the most extraordinary athletes of the stage: pliant ballerinas, gallant romantics, quicksilver tappers, experimental shape-shifters. Flamenco dancers, their heels hammering like hail. To watch these artists move was to hear their hearts speak.

As a young critic, this worried me.

How could I possibly interpret this dynamic, wordless poetry in . . . words? These amazing human beings spin miracles out of music, sweat, and thin air. Their poetry appears and disappears with every step. To write something truthful about a live art-well, to me that seemed about as easy as strutting onstage to pound out my own sevillana.

I found my confidence through verbs. When I write about dance, I seek to re-create the experience of being there, by painting an active portrait of the event and the spell it cast. The right verbs help. Initially, I didn't set out to make my mark through verbs, but I did try to make my writing interesting. I covered a rather niche field, after all, and I wanted to reach a wide audience. Verbs showed me the way. I found the means to think and write about vanishing things by choosing the most accurate, evocative verbs. For example, my last review in the Post focused on a dance by the marvelous Belgian Colombian choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa. Her subject was Argentina's famous former First Lady. This is the opening paragraph:

Eva Perón tears the shoes off her feet and hurls them into the wings. She shouts; she stamps; she flies into the arms of half a dozen lovers. She sprints around the stage trailing white silk like the luminous mist of her own star power.

The verbs I use are simple and blunt. Nothing fancy about them-and that's intentional. I chose short, descriptive verbs that drive the story. They speed it along, conveying, I hope, the energy of the dancer. Also, it's fun to shove aside plain-vanilla leaps and turns and instead describe people billowing and drifting across the stage, shuddering and scootching, soaring like shooting stars arcing into darkness. Closely observing action can spark all kinds of images, and getting one's descriptions rolling with dynamic verbs gives a writer the power to trigger the reader's imagination as well.




It’s the classic rule of journalism: Honor the verb, sacrifice the adjective.

The reporter's aim-the aim of any serious writer-is to produce clean, honest, uncluttered prose. Novelists and poets, fact-finding reporters, executives, managers, students: Every writer must set high standards and strive for clarity and coherence. This is true whether the writing concerns fiction or fact, opinion or research.

As a reader, I also look for enthusiasm. What pulls me in is passion, warmth, and spirit. Throughout this book I'll share top-notch writing of all kinds, and what makes these works snap, sizzle, and catch my heart is enthusiasm-which the writers express with vivid verbs. Great writers honor the verb.

In the passage below from Sally Rooney's novel Beautiful World, Where Are You, a young woman writes to her friend about something rather abstract. She had been trying to reclaim the optimism of past years, she writes, and at last she experienced a sudden flash of it. Notice how Rooney takes us through her narrator's mental actions and then shifts to the actions of an unnameable emotion:

As soon as I realized what I was feeling, I tried to move toward it in my thoughts, to reach out and handle it, but it only cooled a little or shrank away from me, or slipped off further ahead.

This sentence has the clean, flowing energy that Rooney is known for, thanks in large part to her choice of verbs. Simple verbs-move, handle, cool, shrink-hold down the slippery evanescence of thoughts and feelings, so we can see them (and feel them) from different perspectives, and understand something about them. Maybe the verbs prompt us to reflect on our own fleeting emotions, too. That's what they do to me. The writing swirls and flows and my own thoughts eddy along in rhythm.

The best verbs define intention and action, even subtle thinking action, with elegant simplicity. Let's take a quick look at various kinds of verbs now, because understanding the differences among verbs will help you choose what's best for what you mean to say. Making deliberate verb choices can sharpen your work.

Think of three piles. The first contains "stative verbs," which are all about a state of being rather than a dynamic action. They include to be and many other verbs-appear, believe, know, love, prefer, understand, and more-that describe a static situation such as existence, emotion, thought, or a condition.

The other piles comprise two different kinds of action verbs, which we'll call "basic verbs" and "verbs of manner." A basic verb is neutral, ordinary: The dog walks. Verbs of manner are the drama queens, descriptive and specific: The dog wiggles/waddles/wanders. These verbs tell us the way in which an action happens, its speed, force, and feeling-its manner.

Verb-wise, if you write in English, guess what? It's your birthday every day-with shopping sprees at FAO Schwarz-because English overflows with verbs of manner. It's a special feature of the language. A secret superpower, in fact. Linguist Dan I. Slobin at the University of California, Berkeley, has studied verbs of manner around the world, and he notes that, for example, French and Spanish each have a single verb for a jumping motion (bondir in...

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Verlag
Penguin Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2026
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593831462
ISBN 13 
9780593831465
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
224
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
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