To be, or not to be? I’ll go with not.
With so much content screaming for attention today, writing in the most engaging possible way brings our only real hope of breaking through. The good news? We can all write with elegance and power far more easily than you might imagine. To start, we need to choose the right verbs.
This stems from a lesson I readily embraced as a young, graduate journalism student at Northwestern. On that day, an instructor asked us to eliminate all forms of the verb to be. He literally had us cut every instance of is, am, are, was, were out of our assignments. And I loved it.
You may think that nobody could write a piece of any length without using this most common verb. But you can, and should. At least as an exercise.
Why? It produces great writing habits. Instead of penning a lazy sentence like:
- “This post was written without using the passive verb to be.”
You can offer the more active:
- “I excised every instance of the passive verb to be from this post.”
And that summarizes the problem with to be. Using it makes your sentences passive, rather than vibrant and active and alive with strong verbs driving the story.
Try this. The next time you write an email, post or other bit of prose, try to eliminate all forms of to be as you write. Go back and check your work. If you’ve inadvertently slipped it in – careful … is, am, are, was and were have a way of to sneaking into your writing – rewrite those sentences to remove them.
Going forward, you don’t have to cut out every single use of to be from your prose. There may be times you want to use it. But limit them.
You will write powerful, more engaging copy. Every time.
Farrell Kramer 