There’s no hard and fast rule for deciding when a verb is weak or strong, so how can you pick them apart? Here are a few ways to tell whether you’re dealing with a weak or strong verb:
Strong verbs are more specific
A strong verb will be specific and evocative. It won’t make the reader fill in extra information to paint a more vivid picture—a strong verb will just paint that picture for the reader.
For example, if I write “John closed the door,” you don’t have a ton of information. You know John closed the door, but I haven’t indicated his mood or what else might be going on in the scene. ‘Closed’ here is a weak verb. If I wrote “John slammed the door,” we have a more clear picture of what’s going on. We get the idea that John is angry or upset.
Using a stronger verb gave us a more specific, detailed image of that scene.
Weak verbs tend to lead to wordiness
Because weak verbs don’t pull their weight, they force the author to make up for them. This will often result in authors adding lots of extra description or excessive punctuation to compensate for their weak verbs, when really they only need a stronger verb.
Consider the following sentence:
John closed the door angrily and stomped away. “I hate you!”
‘Stomped’ is a pretty evocative verb, but it’s being deployed here because ‘closed’ isn’t pulling its weight. We wouldn’t need to tack on an extra clause to this sentence to suggest that John is angry if we used a stronger verb to begin with.
“John slammed the door. “I hate you!”
See how we get the same basic effect with fewer, more precise words?
Strong verbs aren’t necessarily big verbs
Weak verbs aren’t always short or simple verbs, and strong verbs aren’t always long and complicated verbs. Too much of either is a problem. Overloading your prose with multisyllabic verbs will make your prose feel tired and exhausting, while having a limited selection of short, simple verbs might make it feel two-dimensional.
Basically, you’ll have to take a look at the scene you’re writing and decide what sort of verb you need. In dialogue, for example, you almost never need anything other than “said.” A weak verb is probably best there. However, if you’re writing a dramatic chase sequence, you probably want to reach for something more evocative than “ran really fast.”
Weak verbs tend to require adverbs
A quick way to tell whether you’re using a weak verb is to check for adverbs. I’m not going to tell you that you’re not ever allowed to use adverbs, ever, but I am going to tell you that adverbs, more often than not, indicate a weak verb. Replacing the weak verb and the adverb with a stronger verb makes the prose crisper.
Let’s look at John again for another example:
John closed the door angrily.
Because ‘closed’ isn’t very evocative, we had to add ‘angrily’ to let the reader know what sort of mood is going on. Instead, though, we can swap out both the weak verb (closed) and the adverb (angrily):
John slammed the door.
Weak verbs tend to tell, not show
And, finally, a weak verb tends to tell the audience what’s going on instead of showing them.
Remember how adverbs have to let the reader know how the verb was meant to be used? This is what I mean. With a weak verb, you have to do more work explaining the overall vibe. A strong verb does it for you. Let’s look at a different example this time:
Sarah ran as fast as she could. She breathed heavily and looked into the treeline for a long time, hoping the attackers were gone.
We know what, technically, happened, but we don’t feel like we’re there. It feels like we’re being told about it from a friend instead of living it with Sarah. The weak verbs here are ‘ran,’ ‘breathed,’ and ‘looked.’ Let’s swap ‘em out.
Branches whipped Sarah’s legs and scratched her arms as she sprinted. Panting, she stared into the treeline, hoping the attackers were gone.
We could still use a little more transitioning between these two sentences, but see how just swapping out those verbs made it come to life?
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