Weed. Free the Verbs!

Words, like glass, obscure when they do not aid vision. 
~ Joseph Joubert

When I share my passion for verbs, students and friends defend the use of adjectives and adverbs. They question why I shove verbs at them.  I've heard arguments with a variety of opinions. In fact, one student claimed, "They're in the dictionary!"

To use an adjective - I'm obsessed with lazy writing. Clutter in words obscures the action. I love to read sentences that fly and escape into metaphor.

Show me a beautiful, sunny, warm day! What does it smell like? How does it feel like on the skin?  What colors abound?  Verb it to me in details.

Enrich writing muscles and search for words to express the details. Play with sentence re-arrangement. Exercise when you read.

Today, I picked up a novel that I won't name.  The first sentences had stacked modifiers for each noun. I pruned and tuned the sentences so they helped me ease into the story. 

I have not quoted complete sentences to protect the guilty.

Here we go:

 .  .  .  was woken by a dazzling sliver of sunlight piercing the curtains like a shining silver sword.

A sliver of sunlight pierced the curtains. It dazzled like a sword.

She lay languidly in lace and cashmere.   Is she a chicken?  People lie, hens lay. Let a verb replace languidly? Could she nestle in lace and cashmere?  Then she feels like a chicken. Capture two meanings with one verb.

She watched patterns that the light made flickering through the tender green leaves.  Why tender? Even green overstates the case. Describe the texture, shape or scent of the leaves.

Could the light flicker through leaves?  Dapple the leaves?

Breeze delicately swayed.  A breeze means delicate.  No adverb needed.  An adjective: tired sentence.

How about the indolent heat of summer.  This adjective adds something to the heat but calls attention to itself. A line or two will describe sensations of the heat.

The beech shed leaves in papery bronze drifts; one boisterously windy November.There was hot sun and boisterous sea breezes and a hard unfamiliar bed.
Turn these sentences inside out.

Show me the verbs!  Select. Prune. Weed. Set the verbs free. 

Let the hibiscus bloom in a sentence.

One more:

Thunder rolled like gunfire. The sky purple and swollen with portent, was suddenly split open by a fork of lightning . . . Avoid mixing metaphors.  Find images not used in the past.

Write Challenge:   Send me your adjectives and adverbs. I'll weed them and nourish nouns and verbs.