Verbs Verbs Verbs

What a week of verbs! I always thought verbs were the easiest to come up with when forming a sentence, but that definitely changed for me after this week’s Powerful Verbs assignment.  I found it extremely difficult to rewrite those weak sentences using a stronger and more expressive verb. Some of those sentences didn’t even make sense the way they were written, so I got hung up on how to change the verb!

Finally, after a long night of chanting verbs to myself out loud, I think I came up with a little tip on how to choose the right verb.  

One thing I found that helped me even start the rewrite was to try to replace any “to be” verbs in the sentences with one relevant verb. Once I got rid of those verbs it was much easier to come up with a powerful verb to take its place. Sometimes the sentences don’t always contain “to be” verbs that are easy to replace.  

Another little tip I found that helped was to change the sentence from passive voice to active voice. We all had an assignment this week dealing with just that, so I found that to be extremely helpful. Once you rewrite the sentence in the active voice, you’ll notice that you automatically got rid of the weak verb in the sentence. 

See, not too bad! After doing a few of the other assignments for the class, I found it easier to rewrite those sentences.  Now, the challenge is to actually speak the way we write. 

My sister actually found this spelling mistake and sent it to me. Sadly, it took me a long minute to find the error.