Babel's Dawn

How can you punch up this sentence? I have submitted my application for a job with the EPA?

(a) I have happily submitted my application for a job with the EPA;

(b) I have submitted my request for employment at the EPA;

(c) I have applied for a job with the EPA;

(d) I submitted my application for a job with the EPA.

Most editors would probably favor (c) which reduces a verb phrase to a simple verb. It also simplifies the reader's task. Compare the basic functional structure of I have submitted my application with I have applied for a job. The first directs the reader's attention to a trivial detail, the application, while the second points toward the heart of the matter, the job.

Those interested in improving their writing skills should master this little trick: transform the noun in a verb phrase into the verb: e.g., give a demonstration à demonstrate (or show), be in violation of à violate/break/disobey.

I've taken these examples from a new book on verbs, Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch: let verbs power your writing by Constance Hale. Is there a whole book's worth of reading about verbs? I'm willing to try, for I am a lover of verbs. I've never forgotten a scene in the play The Madness of King George III and coming to attention when the king made this royal pronouncement, "I am the king. I tell. I am not told. I am the verb, sir, not the object." When I saw that on stage, I grinned.

Sadly, the book is an unfocused mess; yet I'm putting it on my approved list because each chapter includes a section called, "Smash" that looks at how the choice of a verb can enliven a sentence. Anybody who is teaching writing to others or to oneself can check out these sections and assemble some decent writing exercises from them.

What's that you say? You read to read, not to do exercises. Then, reader, pass by. The book is full of exercises labeled Try/Do/Write/Play.

The middle chapters, which look at verb tenses, voices and moods, are worth reading in full, but the author is too afraid of the richness of the complications she reports. She quotes a marvelous bit by Joan Didion: Grammar is a piano I play by ear, since I seem to have been out of school the year the rules were mentioned. All I know of grammar is its infinite power. That's the secret. Grammar is not a set of rules never mastered, not a way of putting people down for saying "he slud into second base." It is a source of power that lets a person say exactly what the speaker wants to say.

Hale seems to know this point. She opens her chapter on verb tenses with an account of an immigrant patient whose English only includes the present tense. A doctor asks about quitting smoking and is told: I try. I don't smoke for six weeks. Without the ability to conjugate verbs we cannot say if this sentence would best be rendered as: I will try to quit smoking for six weeks or I'm trying and have not smoked for six weeks or I tried once and gave up after six weeks. Teaching grammar to this patient would be a form of empowerment, not harassment. But Hale then goes on to bemoan the complications of English tenses and concludes her little anecdote with, "No wonder the patient stuck to the simple present!" (p. 130)

Teachers do well to encourage their students and not join in the chorus of OMG, it's so awful. Just remember that you are giving your student/reader/audience powers to use, not rules to beware.

I would have been happier if the author brought a little more imagination to her subject. She talks about the patient's choices in terms of the conventional time dimension—past, present, and future tenses—but just by looking at the patients sentence we can see there is something wrong. The patient has used the simple present, but none of the possible interpretations use the simple present. Why not?

Quitting smoking is not an event but a process, and processes can be ongoing (am trying), completed (have tried), or yet to start (will try).

Tenses are only very incompletely understood if writers or speakers think only in terms of past, present and future. Knowing the rules is secondary to knowing how to use words to make yourself clear. Consider a story that begins, "A priest, a rabbi, and a minister walk into a bar. The bartender says…" The verbs—walk and says—are both present tense. Does that mean the bar scene is happening now? No. So should we use the past tense: walked and said? We could, but this tale is made up. It didn't happen in the past either. English has a way of revealing that something never happened. The storyteller could say: Were a priest a rabbi, and a minister to walk into a bar, the bartender might say…So why don't joke tellers, at least the grammatically fastidious ones, use this verb form? Because in a joke nobody cares when something did or did not happen. If you want to involve an audience in the immediacy of a situation, use a tense that puts them at the scene. Think of the present tense as a you-are-there tense. Play-by-play sports announcers love this tense: Babe Ruth swings and misses. If they were being precise about times, announcers would have to admit that the event reported is already past: The Babe swung and missed. But what is gained in correct time reporting removes the audience a bit from the event. Such I-was-there reporting can work in a novel because what is lost is immediacy is recovered in credibility. In telling the story of Moby Dick, the narrator (Ishmael) mostly uses a tense that indicates he was there. So it is credible. It doesn't kill the joke to tell it in the I-was-there tense but it does put a little space between the story and the audience. The most removed version of our joke is told in the we-will-never-be-there tense. It can work, often by exaggerating the impossibility of the scene. If I were king, dukes would strew rose petals in your pathway.

So yes, there is surely a book's worth of things to say about the effective use of verbs. This book can get you started thinking about some of them.

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