Your verbs aren't doing their job.
But most writers misdiagnose the problems in their writing. They think it's complexity. They think it's clarity. They think it's length.
But the real culprit is buried in their grammar. And it's sucking the life out of your writing.
Take this sentence from a legal document:
| "The reorganization of the old Department into two new Departments should also include the institution and maintenance of separate detailed bookkeeping procedures." |
Sounds professional, right? But it's dead on arrival.
The verb is "include"—but that's not what the organization needs to do. That's just a connector word dressed up as action.
The real actions are buried:
- reorganize
- institute
- maintain
Why this matters: When your verbs don't carry the action, your readers mentally check out.
Imagine this: your reader arrives to your sentence with a few basic question. The first question is, What's going on here?
They expect to find the answer to that question in one structural location: the verb.
When writers fail to meet that expectation, they give readers some extra work. Now the reader needs to go rummaging around your nouns and adverbs to make sense of what's going on.
The fix is simple: