Writing Tools: 55 Essential Strategies for Every Writer

Embedded in all that verbal activity is one splendid passive verb: “His pale eyes were frosted with sun glare.” Form follows function. The eyes, in real life, received the action of the sun, so the subject receives the action of the verb. That’s the writing tool: use passive verbs to call attention to the receiver of the action.

Use the long sentence to describe something long. Let form follow function.

“Why should I get writer’s block?” asked the mischievous Roger Simon. “My father never got truck driver’s block.”

Writing long sentences means going against the grain. But isn’t that what the best writers do? In his novel The Rings of Saturn, W. G. Sebald uses the long sentence to explain—and mirror—the antique prose style of English essayist Sir Thomas Browne: In common with other English writers of the seventeenth century, Browne wrote out of the fullness of

Tense defines action within time—when the verb happens—the present, past, or future. Voice defines the relationship between subject and verb—who does what. • If the subject performs the action of the verb, we call the verb active. • If the subject receives the action of the verb, we call the verb passive. • A verb that is neither active nor passive

the present. This strategy immerses readers in the immediacy of experience, as if we were sitting—right now—beside the poor woman in her grief.

Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style advises the writer to “place emphatic words in a sentence at the end,” an example of its own rule. The most emphatic word appears at “the end.” Application of this tool will improve your prose in a flash.

Nuts and bolts: strategies for making meaning at the word, sentence, and paragraph levels

forms with a pencil. In the margins, categorize each verb. 2. Convert passive and to be verbs into the active. For example, “It was her observation that” can become “She observed.” 3. In your own work and in the newspaper, search for verb qualifiers and see what happens when you cut them. 4. Experiment with both voice and tense. Find a passage you