Antony West (Author)

Verbs are the engine of a sentence. They do the work. They create the action. And yet, so many young writers rely on weak, flabby verbs. ‘Was,’ ‘went,’ ‘said.’ We need to show them the power of a strong verb. Instead of “He went to the shop,” why not “He trudged to the shop,” or “He sprinted to the shop”? This is where explicit instruction from people like Alex Quigley comes in. Let’s have a ‘verb feast’ where we brainstorm as many powerful verbs as we can for a single action. It’s about building a muscular vocabulary, one word at a time.