a noun. Without a noun (or pronoun), how do we indicate the very subject we are talking/writing about? In the example above, without nouns, you'd have, "outside the," "inside the," and "in ." It wouldn't make any sense.

Adjectives we can sometimes live without, but for the most part we have

Remember back in the dark days of your school years when you had to learn the parts of speech? A noun is the name of a person, place, or thing. When asked what a verb was, you smugly answered, A verb is a word that indicates action, or some such definition. Fine. You got that straight. Since then, you've uttered or written verbs in the hundreds of thousands.

Verbs are great words. They enable us to describe actions or states of being or feelings we'd be hard pressed to convey without them. "John outside the house. John inside the house. John in bed." Primitive, to say the least. With the help of verbs, we can say, "John came home and went directly to bed." Still, if verbs are indispensable in our speech and in our writing, why do we neglect them so?

Yes, we neglect them terribly. There are countless verbs just sitting in our dictionaries that are rarely taken out and used, seldom get to feel themselves flowing out of our mouths or proudly sitting on the paper on which we write. You have to feel sorry for them.

Why are they neglected? You can blame it on the nouns and adjectives. They're the real culprits. We can't express a worthwhile thought without a noun. Without a noun (or pronoun), how do we indicate the very subject we are talking/writing about? In the example above, without nouns, you'd have, "outside the," "inside the," and "in ." It wouldn't make any sense.

Adjectives we can sometimes live without, but for the most part we have

n, you've uttered or written verbs in the hundreds of thousands.

Verbs are great words. They enable us to describe actions or states of being or feelings we'd be hard pressed to convey without them. "John outside the house. John inside the house. John in bed." Primitive, to say the least. With the help of verbs, we can say, "John came home and went directly to bed." Still, if verbs are indispensable in our speech and in our writing, why do we neglect them so?

Yes, we neglect them terribly. There are countless verbs just sitting in our dictionaries that are rarely taken out and used, seldom get to feel themselves flowing out of our mouths or proudly sitting on the paper on which we write. You have to feel sorry for them.

Why are they neglected? You can blame it on the nouns and adjectives. They're the real culprits. We can't express a worthwhile thought without a noun. Without a noun (or pronoun), how do we indicate the very subject we are talking/writing about? In the example above, without nouns, you'd have, "outside the," "inside the," and "in ." It wouldn't make any sense.

Adjectives we can sometimes live without, but for the most part we have

ith the help of verbs, we can say, "John came home and went directly to bed." Still, if verbs are indispensable in our speech and in our writing, why do we neglect them so?

Yes, we neglect them terribly. There are countless verbs just sitting in our dictionaries that are rarely taken out and used, seldom get to feel themselves flowing out of our mouths or proudly sitting on the paper on which we write. You have to feel sorry for them.

Why are they neglected? You can blame it on the nouns and adjectives. They're the real culprits. We can't express a worthwhile thought without a noun. Without a noun (or pronoun), how do we indicate the very subject we are talking/writing about? In the example above, without nouns, you'd have, "outside the," "inside the," and "in ." It wouldn't make any sense.

Adjectives we can sometimes live without, but for the most part we have

d used, seldom get to feel themselves flowing out of our mouths or proudly sitting on the paper on which we write. You have to feel sorry for them.

Why are they neglected? You can blame it on the nouns and adjectives. They're the real culprits. We can't express a worthwhile thought without a noun. Without a noun (or pronoun), how do we indicate the very subject we are talking/writing about? In the example above, without nouns, you'd have, "outside the," "inside the," and "in ." It wouldn't make any sense.

Adjectives we can sometimes live without, but for the most part we have

a noun. Without a noun (or pronoun), how do we indicate the very subject we are talking/writing about? In the example above, without nouns, you'd have, "outside the," "inside the," and "in ." It wouldn't make any sense.

Adjectives we can sometimes live without, but for the most part we have been brainwashed since those same school days to use adjectives. As writers, we use them extensively, carefully choosing, then eliminating, then choosing again, until we feel we have the perfect adjectives to describe our protagonist, our settings, our emotions. I suspect much of your time as a writer is devoted to being so very particular in the adjectives you use. That's great. That's important.

To get back to the poor, neglected verbs. Oh, we use them all right. We use the few hundred (if that many) in our vocabulary. We use what we need, we use the ones we're comfortable with, we use the same old, tired, hackneyed verbs day in and day out. What are those verbs? They're the dead verbs. The ones which may tell others that something happened, but never tell anything more than that, never give the reader an image of a special kind of action.

Let's go back to the example above. I used two verbs, "came" and "went." All those two verbs tell you is that John was no longer outside his house, and is now in his bed. What if I had said, "John flew though the front door and dashed upstairs to his bed."? You get a picture: for whatever reason, John was in a hurry. How