Being verbs describe a state of being. In English, these verbs are any conjugated form of "to be."

I am
You are
He/she is
We are
They are

Action verbs describe an action. Throwing, running, skipping, doing, helping, fixing, mending, drinking, sleeping...just about anything, really. There are a great many action verbs out there.

Let's take the verb "throw" as an example: "To throw" is conjucated like this:

I throw
You throw
He/she throws
We throw
They throw

Now, let's talk past tense. Past tense does not change the type of verb. A being verb in past tense is still a being verb. An action verb in past tense is still an action verb.

I was
You were
He/she was
We were
They were

I threw
You threw
He/She threw
We threw
they threw

This is past tense. It does not change the meaning of a verb, only the time in which it happened. I am 28. I was 27 a month ago. I throw this out at you so you understand. Yesterady, I threw out a topic that sparked this discussion.

Another tense is called past perfect.

I had been
You had been
He/she had been
We had been
They had been

I had thrown
You had thrown
He/she had thrown
We had thrown
They had thrown

This tense is most often used in fiction written in the past tense when describing something that happened before the current action. For example.

Jenny and Carla sat on the porch, drinking lemonade and enjoying the fresh air. They had worked hard all day and deserved this break.

(BTW, there is not a single state of being in that example.)

I'm not really sure what else to say on this topic. Feel free to ask questions.

[This message has been edited by Christine (edited July 15, 2005).]
 

(Grammar and Spelling is my weakness)

 

Let me give you another example:

I had been dating Brad for five years when he cheated on me. We had been having some problems, but I had never imagined he would go that far. I mean, he could have come to me. I know I had made some mistakes, and so had he, but it had not been beyond repair.

Are you getting as annoyed by reading the word "had" as I am writing it? There is nothing grammatically wrong with this paragraph, but that doesn't always make it good.

Critiques are the best way of finding out if something you are doing is coming across badly.
 

Thanks for the lesson.

Okay, so in my example below:

He had taken her bowling on Wednesday night. Bowling! What kind of a date was that? She was made to wear ugly shoes that had been used by dozens of other people before her.

The first sentence is in past perfect, so it's fine and doesn't need a 'to be' sorting out?

But if it was something that was taking place currently in the story and I wrote:

Dave had taken her bowling. They were throwing balls down the alley at an alarming rate.

Then it would be bad. This would be better:

Dave took her bowling. They threw balls down the alley at an alarming rate.
 

Have y'all ever read about e-prime? (google e-prime for all the information you could possibly want.) essentially, a formalized "no being verbs" movement. I do not strictly adhere to e-prime but I believe that carefully considering my use of being verbs has improved my writing.

The castle was magnificent.
The castle looked magnificent.
The castle sounded magnificent.
The castle stood proud and magnificent.

Ok...back to the past perfect.

"Dave took her bowling. They threw balls down the alley at an alarming rate."

Whether or not this is better in terms of past perfect vs. past tense depends entirely upon how you're telling the story. Let's try these two contexts:

Dan took her out to dinner. They ate quickly, barely speaking to one another. Then Dan took her bowling where they threw balls down the alley at an alarming rate.

Alternately:

Saturday morning, Dan and Cindy still weren't speaking to one another. The previous night Dan had taken her bowling where they threw balls down the alley at an aalarming rate.

Do you see the different in perspective here? In the first, we are writing about that night. In the second, it is about that night told from the perspective of the next morning.

Let me give you an example of past perfect done poorly in published material, in this case: Harry Potter (the third one). I do love the series, but sometimes have to overlook some choices Rowling makes in her writing style that I consider bad.

So, Harry blows up his aunt. During that scene we hear:

"But Aunt Marge suddenly stopped speaking. For a moment it looked as though words had failed her. She seemed to be swelling with inexpressible anger. But the swelling didn't stop. Her great red face started to expand. Her tiny eyes bulged and her mouth stretched too tightly for speech. Next second, several buttons had burst from her jacket and pinged off the walls."

Look at that last sentence for a second. Here we are...action..action...oh this is exciting. Then we move forward again a few seconds so we can rewind and say what HAD happened...why not just keep going? Keep the action up?

There is nothing grammatically wrong with this. Some people may argue that it is a stylistic choice that is perfectly ok, but I found it annoying. She does it several more times over the next few paragraphs, and throughout her series, for that matter.
 

quote:

---

He had taken her bowling on Wednesday night. Bowling! What kind of a date was that? She was made to wear ugly shoes that had been used by dozens of other people before her.

---

The first sentence has no 'to be' verb in it. What may be confusing is that there IS a helping verb, just not a 'to be' one. The perfect tenses use 'to have' as a helping verb. The function of the past perfect is to place a past event *further back* in the past than some other past event. If this is a flashback, then using the past perfect in the first sentence is pretty much inescapable. However, sentences with helping verbs take a bit more mental energy to comprehend than ones with simple verbs, so it's best to use the past perfect only when it is inescapable. As you have done here, you should switch to the simple past once you have used the past perfect to establish that it is a flashback.

However, there are three other instances of 'to be' verbs in your passage. Note that I am not saying that as a criticism. I don't have any problem with 'to be' verbs. I'm a linguist -- I'm just counting what I see. If you, personally, want to apply the various suggestions for clear writing that professional writers and writing teachers have developed (and there is probably a lot of merit to them), then learning to spot these 'to be' verbs is a good skill. So, I'll point them out. You can decide whether you want to change them or not.

** "What kind of a date was that?"

This is a sentence with "to be" as a main verb -- a copular sentence. The main verb is "was", and the subject is "that". My personal opinion is that this sentence is perfectly clear as it is -- rewording it to avoid using a copula would probably make it more awkward.

** "She was made to wear ugly shoes..."

This is a passive. The helping verb is "was" and the perfect participle is "made". The active version would be "someone made her wear ugly shoes". You could also try a circumlocution to avoid the passive: "she had to wear ugly shoes." I'm not saying that would be better -- I'm just laying out the options. You decide what seems clearest to you.

** "...that had been used by dozens of other people before her."

Another passive. Helping verb: "been"; perfect participle: "used". This might be tricky to identify because there are two helping verbs ("had" is the other one). The active version would be "that dozens of other people had used before her" and a circumlocution would be something like "that bore the dried sweat and dead skin cells from dozens of previous users." Again, nothing inherently evil about passives. Although having TWO passive clauses in one sentence may be a bit much.

I hope that was helpful.

Best,

K.

Finding a dynamic way to describe things (usually by picking an appropriate substitute for "was"), is a great way to make your description more interesting.

And in hopes of not causing even more confusion, I'd like to say that "dynamic" is not exactly the same as "active" but they're close (after all, they're both opposites for "static").
 

quote:

---

I'd like to say that "dynamic" is not exactly the same as "active"

---

Very true. Grammatically, the term "active" refers to a quality of the subject. If the subject is the "agent" of the action, the sentence is active. If the subject is instead the patient, the sentence is passive. (I didn't make that up -- agent and patient are official technical terms in linguistics.)

I don't know any linguistic definition for dynamic -- that might be more of a literary term. My impression, though, is that it would refer to the verb -- where does it fall on the continuum from state to action? "Being" is not an action but a state; "killing" and "melting" are actions, not states. I guess you could say that in order to kill or to melt, there has to be a change in state, whereas "being" implies lack of change. A verb like "sleeping" might fall somewhere in the middle of this continuum because it has a state (the being asleep part) but also changes (the falling asleep and waking up parts).

If that makes any sense, then "standing magnificent" might be regarded as more dynamic than "being magnificent" because the latter simply describes a state. The former implies that the magnificence inheres in the standing. If the castle were to start to slump or crumble, for example, the magnificence would lessen -- a possibility for change that is not implied by the "to be" verb version.

OK, well I've rambled on about that for long enough. Thanks for putting up with me!!

Best,

K.
 

Righto. I think I'm getting into the spirit of this now.

I checked out some stuff about E-Prime too. While, I'm not sure that I think it necessary to write 100% this way, I can see where the advantages lie.

Now then, I just went back and checked out the start of my Work In Progress. This is the first sentence of it. Check out the 'to be' words here:

It was a perfect Friday morning, Alyson was ill, it was pouring with rain.

If an publisher / editor were to read this in the slush pile, would it go straight into the SAE and be on its way back to me? Or is this acceptible? Anybody like to take up the challenge and offer some suggestions to take out the 'to be' words?

[This message has been edited by benskia (edited July 18, 2005).]
 

I would stop reading, but it has nothing to do with the "to be" verbs...or at least, very little.

"It was a perfect Friday morning, Alyson was ill, it was pouring with rain. "

Commas don't just let you tack more stuff onto a sentence. If you put an "and" after the last comma, it would at least be grammatically correct, although I'm still not thinking it's a good sentence.

Honestly, I wouldn't just try to remove the "to be"'s from this sentence, I would completely rewrite it. What's interesting here? What do you want us to know? What's the hook? I'm not even sure what you mean by it. Here are some options.

1. The combination of being sick on a miserable day makes it a perfect Friday: she gets to stay home, watch movies, lounge aobut, and not even long to be outside.

2. It could be sarcastic: Oh yeah, how perfect...she's sick and it's raining.

3. The perfection could have nothing to do with the rest of the sentence and, in fact, if you make the grammar correction I suggested it does that. The day was perfect, someone was sick, and it was raining. All right. That's three things we know about your setup.

 

K. I reworded it too in response to the commas and got rid of 1 of the "to be's":

It was a perfect Friday morning, the rain poured down outside and Alyson was ill.

I tried to make a hook out of it by making the reader wonder what on earth is perfrect about it raining and her being ill. The answer of course is similar to that you suspected--because she can stay inside and play her computer all day long.
 

Moreover, even if you reworded the sentence a bit, I don't see why the question of why someone's having a perfect rainy sick day is all that much of a hook. It sounds very much like the kind of thing that gets answered in the rest of the paragraph and then I would want to move on to something more solid...something that invokes one of the emotions I suggested above.

Now, if her perfect, sick day all of a sudden gets interrupted by a mad axe murderer, well, now you've got my attention!
 

I've done a bit more pondering and reading about E-prime that I'd like to relate here & see if I can try to make a bit more sense out of it whilst I do so.

One of the sites I read hinted that the 'to be' words attempt to state that one thing equals another. So for example 'The apple is green' is directly equating the apple to be green. But if you then say 'The grass is green' then this could lead to 'the apple is grass' seeing as both objects equal green.

So that's one reason that people dont like them.

But, I have come across a little bit of a conundrum here as well. Because when you read about Eprime, a lot of the circumstances which talk about removing the 'to be' word result in needing to add the words 'seemed' or 'appeared'.

For example 'The weather was warm' could be altered to 'The weather seemed warm'. Now, the problem here is that I've come across many an advice page that tells us that 'seemed' and 'appeared' and other similar ones are words to be avoided because they weaken the text. I believe they do as well. I think it could be better to state that the weather was actually (actually is another one of those words to avoid, but I've put it in here) warm and didn't just seem it.

Another way to phrase this could be 'the weather felt warm' but again, i've read that instead of telling how something feels, it's better to show it instead. So maybe 'the weather blah blah blah' ought to be replaced with something more along the lines of 'sweat dripped from the girl's brow'.

Therefore I am coming to a bit of a conclusion whilst writing this that instead of trying to simply reword things to avoid the words 'was, is, had been, will be' etc the whole phrase might need work too.

I suppose a lot of it comes down to how quickly you want to get the message across which could be derived from the importance of the information that you need to portray.

Any thoughts? Do I get any gold stars today?
 

[This message has been edited by Christine (edited July 19, 2005).]
 

Instead of saying "the weather is warm" you could say "the weather seemed warm" but yes, that's weaselly. How about instead saying "The warm weather made Clarissa sweat. She'd hoped the evil robot monkeys would attack on a cooler day."

The goal is not the elimination of veing verbs from your writing. The goal is strong, solid writing, good characters, good plot, etc.

Let us take the goal of strong writing, for a moment. What is the goal of strong writing? To convey a message, hopefully the right one. There are hundreds of right ways to phrase a pragraph. There are probably even more wrong ways, but there are lots of right ways. First, keep that in mind. There is no one way.

Second, think about the big picture. An apple being green is wholly uninteresting. I doubt it has much at all to do with the story, it is just a point of description. Even the shiny red apple in "Snow White" is only interesting because it's poisoned. Let me write you a paragraph:

The witch was evil. She wanted to kill Snow White. She gave Snow White an apple. The apple was red. The apple was poisoned. Snow White was asleep until a handsome prince woke her up.

Very passive, very much just saying what things are doing. How boring.

The evil witch wanted to kill Snow White, for the girl's beauty outshone the witch's. The evil witch poisoned a shiny red apple, sure she could coax Snow White into taking a bite. One juicy bite, and the girl would fall forever into deathlike sleep. The witch's plan could only be ruined by the kiss of a handsome prince.

What I'm trying to say here is that story isn't about description. Description facilitates the story, it is woven through and around it when done properly. "The apple was red" is a sentence for a children's book. In adult books, it's a "red apple", and it's doing something important to the plot.

BTW, I was reading what you said about e-prime earlier...it is absolutely ludicrous to say that a state of being is the same as equal. Obviously, whoever wrote that does not understand a state of being. The apple is green does not infer at all that the apple and green are equivolent. It infers that the apple is in a state of being green...that is, in this case, that the color green is just one of the many properties of the apple. The apple shares the property, green, with grass. But grass has many other things that it "is" that are different from green and different from apples. So no, "is" and "equal" are not at all the same thing, nor particularly close. Someone needs their head examined.
 

It's been an interesting ride, even if I may have tested at your patience a little. Sorry about that, but I didn't want to just say 'yes' and only pretend to understand something that I feel is going to be pretty valuable to my work going forwards.

Muchos Grats.
 

Please don't hesitate to ask for clarification. And one of the best ways to do that is to state what you understand so far. Then we know what needs to be said to clarify and help you understand better.

I give this whole discussion a gold star.