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Write Guru| Clarity | Yangtze |
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Suggest improvements for the highlighted problem area: Depending on which Chinese person you ask, the Yangtze River might be called Ta Jiang (Great River), or Chang Jiang (Long River), or even Chin-sha Jiang (The River of Gold Sand). This is an illustration of the peculiar Chinese custom for naming anything and everything. In the Wushan gorges, a boat captain might wave to The Seated Woman and the Pouncing Lion or steer carefully through The Ox-Liver and Horse-Lung Gorge. Every rock and cliff has a name, and each name contains a hint at a unique story. Answer: - Dead Verbs - One way to make our writing clear is to free the verb to say what it wants to say. All too often we deaden the vitality of a verb by enclosing it in a soupy phrase. The broth for this soup is often a form of the verb to be, such as is, are, was, were, will be, or have been. We find an example in our opening paragraph:
This sentence speaks with more force if we unleash the descriptive power of the verb:
We should always look in our writing for verbs buried behind some form of the verb to be. Notice how the sentences become more direct and vibrant in the following examples:
Flood levels at Bellows Gorge exceed 75 meters.
Meng's name for the boulder depended on his mood.
Our arrival will coincide with the monsoon season.
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