Our word choices give a sentence its luster, and they deserve intense attention.

Writers dream of sentences that sail through the waters of thought. We try to control their shape and size, and we struggle to let them glide, rather than thrash at sea.

A sentence can offer a moment of quiet, it can crackle with energy or it can just lie there, listless and uninteresting. What makes the difference? The verb.

Verbose is not a synonym for literary.

Language can still be an adventure if we remember that words can make a kind of melody. In novels, news stories, memoirs and even to-the-point memos, music is as important as meaning. In fact, music can drive home the meaning of words.

Some of the worst writing around suffers from inert verbs and the unintended use of the passive voice. Yet the passive voice remains an important arrow in the rhetorical quiver. After all, it exists for a reason.

The flesh of prose gets its shape and strength from the bones of grammar.