Use active verbs.
It’s a prescription for writing success long promoted by writers and teachers.
Active verbs propel the reader. They bring action to the page. They are concise (compare “walk back and forth” to “pace,” or “is holding in her hand” to “cradle.”)
Active verbs bring energy, helping to create what John Gardner, the late novelist and professor, called “the vivid continuous dream” that glues readers to stories.
Earlier this week, while researching another story, I discovered a fascinating report that put this time-honored writing technique under the gaze of science.
“For more than 60 years,” a 2004 story in Science News Online reported, “scientists have known that a strip of neural tissue that runs ear-to-ear along the brain’s surface orchestrates most voluntary movement, from raising a fork to kicking a ball.”
It turns out this part of the brain also fires up when people silently read certain words, scientists reported in the journal Neuron.
“They have to be action words — active verbs,” the Science News Online story said, a conclusion certain to cheer wordsmiths.
Friedemann Pulvermüller, a neuroscientist in Cambridge, England of the
Medical Research Council in Cambridge, England, and his colleagues, used brain imaging technology to compare what happened as 14 adult volunteers read “strings of meaningless hash marks on a computer screen and then read
lists of arbitrary nouns and lists of face-, arm-, and leg-related verbs.”
Take the word “lick.” The researchers found that the brains of volunteers who read these active verbs showed increased blood flow — a sign of brain activity — in the part of the motor cortex that makes the tongue and mouth move. Victor de Lafuente and Ranulfo Romo, two scientists in Mexico City made similar discoveries.
“Remarkably,” the pair reported, “just the reading of feet-related action words such as dance makes [the motor cortex] move its ‘feet.’ “
Pulvermüller, the Cambridge scientist, has made a career of studying how language is organized in the brain. On his Web site, he offers “Papers on Brain Language Mechanisms,” and he is the author of, “The Neuroscience of Language.“
I’m curious what else he has to say on the subject.
In the meantime, I’ll keep looking for active verbs, inspired by scientific confirmation of advice I’ve given and taken for years, not knowing until now that if my characters kick, kiss or dance, so will my readers’ brains.
