Verbs are the tendons, ligaments and muscles of Englishcomposition. They keep our sentences going, but it's possible tohave too much of a good thing. Consider:
"An 18-month-old girl was drowned Saturday morning, apparentlyafter falling into a shallow pool. . . ."
The passive construction messes up the sentence. We ask, wasdrowned by whom? It's much better to write simply that "an18-month-old girl drowned Saturday morning." As a general rule, theactive voice is usually better. It gets rid of flab.The passive ailment could be seen in a headline last year in theStatesville (N.C.) Record & Landmark: "Air Force pilots told to tonedown wild parties by general." You kind of wonder what the generalwas up to. Use of the active voice makes things clear: "Generaltells Air Force pilots to tone down wild parties."Writers should be wary of what doubtfully might be termed thepast-perfect tense in the passive voice: "Only 12 days earlier,Gonzales had his license revoked due to a drunken driving charge."We may be reasonably certain that Gonzales did not walk into theDivision of Motor Vehicles and say, "Here's my license. Pleaserevoke it."Some sentences wind up in spasms: "If the Buckeyes would havelost, radio counselor Dr. Laura Schlessinger might have had to set upemergency lines to Columbus." I'm not sure what grammarians callthese tenses, but I advise writers to avoid them. Much better towrite: "If the Buckeyes had lost," and go on from there.Here's another tangle, from the Associated Press in Miami lastJanuary: "Detectives also learned Friday that rush-hour commuters mayhave loaded bags of money into their cars and drove off as the Brinkstruck driver and his assistant lay bleeding on the ground." A decentrespect for parallelism demands that "loaded" be paired with"driven." The opportunistic commuters "may have loaded . . . anddriven."The employment of some verbs depends mostly upon a writer'staste for novelty. Last year, Newsweek identified Dan Thomason as "asongwriter who authors Christian music." The bastardized verb turnedup in the New York Times last month in an item about a lawsuitinvolving the musical "Rent." A judge ruled that the work "was thesole creation of Jonathan Larson and had not been authored with acollaborator.""To author" strikes me as an abomination. A panel in the HarperDictionary of Contemporary Usage felt the same way. Members objectedthat we wouldn't say, "She poeted three poems" and, "Her motherreadered all three." The same objection applies to "gift," as in,"They gifted the couple with china and silver."I can't give you much for "to obsess," either. During theRepublican National Convention of '96, Time magazine reported that"network anchors obsessed constantly about the tightly scriptedevent." I concede that dictionaries sanction "to obsess," but Istumble over it.Questions regularly arise about "to garnish," as in an accountof a Florida man who owed $96,000 in back child support: "Koontz'swages now are being garnished to the tune of $140 per week." Mostpeople think of "garnishing" in terms of decorating a platter ofcatfish with a few sprigs of parsley. I would limit the verb to thisusage and revert to the 17th century "garnishee" for courtproceedings against a debtor.The use of "snuck" as the past tense of "sneak" appears to begaining ground, but the issue isn't settled. You will recall thatsome months ago, Peruvian rebels held 74 hostages in the house of theJapanese ambassador. The AP writer in Tokyo reported that a TVjournalist "sneaked" into the house. The AP writer in Lima said thejournalist "snuck" in.As I have remarked before in this space, "sneaked" strikes me asmuch sneakier than snuck, but all my dictionaries sanction "snuck,"and only the editors of the American Heritage College Dictionaryvoice reservations about its use. Both forms have spunk and vigor.Either one suffices for healthy, well-muscled prose.
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