Characters as subjects, actions as verbs
The clearest sentences tell a small story — the main character in the subject, the action in the verb; murky prose buries both, usually inside a nominalization.
On this page
Two ways to tell one story. "Once upon a time, a climb up the beanstalk was undertaken on the part of Jack, when the giant's discovery of him took place, resulting in his fright." Versus: "Once upon a time, Jack climbed up the beanstalk when the giant discovered him and frightened him." The second is clearer for one reason — it puts its characters in the subjects and its actions in the verbs. Storytelling isn't only a grand structure; it happens at the level of the sentence.
How it works
Answer the two questions a reader is always asking: who is doing this, and what are they doing? Put the who — the main character — in the subject, the slot that gives a sentence its focus, like center stage in a musical or the middle of a camera frame. Put the what — the action — in the verb. Trouble starts when the action freezes into a noun, a nominalization: "investigate" becomes "investigation," "discover" becomes "discovery." Those verb-nouns drag in flabby stand-ins — "undertaken," "took place," "resulting" — and the story goes vague. The fix is to hunt the buried action and hand it back to a character.
The passive is an agency tool
Putting characters in subjects is the default, not an absolute — and the exception is worth knowing, because "never use the passive" is a rule best retired. The passive voice controls agency: who appears in the sentence, and whether they're named at all. Darwin ends the first edition of On the Origin of Species with "endless forms most beautiful… have been, and are being, evolved" — passive, and pointedly agentless; something evolves them, but he won't say what. A later edition changes it to "having been originally breathed by the Creator," naming the agent and altering the book's entire closing note. So before you "fix" a passive, ask the two questions that matter: who is the main character here, and do you even want to name the agent — or would naming them be irrelevant, impolite, or loaded?
Why it matters
Readers grasp a sentence fastest when its grammar matches the shape of the events — an agent, then the agent's action. Miss that shape and even a correct sentence feels abstract and slow, because the reader has to reassemble the story you took apart. Characters-in-subjects, actions-in-verbs is the highest-leverage move in the language, and most other sentence advice is a special case of it.
The subject is a spotlight
The subject slot doesn't only aid clarity; it decides what a sentence is about. "The dog chased the cat" and "The cat was chased by the dog" carry identical facts, but if your reader cares about the cat, the first version spends its focus on the wrong animal. Whatever sits in the subject reads as the sentence's point of view — so put the person, company, or idea your reader actually cares about there, and hold it there across a run of sentences to keep a consistent focus. This is also how you rescue jargon in any field: "Companies are permitted by the amended statute to…" buries the character, while "The amended statute permits companies to…" puts one back on stage.
Try it
- Circle the main characters. Are they the subjects, or are they buried in prepositional phrases?
- Underline the real actions. Are they verbs, or nouns ending in -tion, -ment, -ance?
- Rewrite so a character is the subject and its action is the verb: "the discovery of X was made by Y" becomes "Y discovered X."
Common pitfalls
Treating this as a ban on nominalizations. It isn't — English kept them for good reasons: to hook back to a prior sentence ("These theories all rest on…"), to replace "the fact that," to name a concept your readers already treat as a character ("the greenhouse effect"). The skill is telling which nominalization hides an action that wants to be a verb, and which is a settled concept you can leave alone.
That focus comes from the subject position — the grammatical location that gives your readers a sense of focus. It's like center stage in a musical, or the middle of a camera frame.
WILLIAM · 9 TECHNIQUES FOR CLEARER WRITING · 2026
Every sentence tells a story. Put the character in the subject and the action in the verb, and the story tells itself.
Drawn from
- William, 9 Techniques for Clearer Writing (I Wish I Knew Sooner) (Writer Science, 2026).
- William, 7 First-Draft Mistakes I Fix All the Time (Writer Science, 2025) — the subject as spotlight, and the dog-and-cat sentences.
- William, Writing Advice I've Changed My Mind About (Writer Science, 2026) — the passive voice as an agency tool, and Darwin's ending.
- Joseph M. Williams, Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace — the characters-as-subjects, actions-as-verbs principle.
- Related: Chain old information to new, Point a camera at it.