All right, welcome to Writing Tip of the Day with Mrs. Lawrence and Mr. Anderson. Obviously, I am Mr. Anderson. And today, we will be covering strong verbs. It's important as a writer to realize that strong verbs are far superior than weak verbs. And so over the course of the lesson, we're going to practice revising weak verbs. We're going to look at avoiding 2B verbs and when we use a verb plus an ad verb. Then we'll figure out a way to apply that to your own writing. All right, well, the thing with strong verbs is that we want to show action that the reader can easily imagine. We want the people reading to visualize the life, the energy, the details, and the things that we are writing about. And active verbs are a really good way to add these qualities to your own writing. 2B verbs are something that writers tend to use on their first time through. And the trouble with 2B verbs is that they don't actually show action. If you look at the sentence here, Anna is a nice girl. You can see that we don't really know why she's nice. If you look over here at the other sentence, you can see we know she's nice because she smiles at her classmates in the hall. It's a much better image. At the second sentence here, the writer has simply said that dog is mean. Well, again, we don't really have any good examples. But if you look at the modified sentence, you can see here that the dog is growling at everyone he sees. It's a much better image, much stronger. Last but not least, here we have the weather is nice. Well, that could mean just about anything. And the modified sentence gives us a much better example by saying the sun shines in the blue sky. Again, it isn't the exact same sentence, but it's a much superior sentence to what the writer had said previously. Now, I want you to take a look at these four sentences. And if you want to, you can pause the video right now, take out your own notebook, and write down modified sentences using stronger verbs. So go ahead and pause that if you want to. Otherwise, you can plow ahead and I'll give you some suggestions. All right, first sentence here says the crowd was noisy. Again, this isn't particularly specific. Instead of was noisy, we might write something about the crowd screaming or the crowd chanting to get us much more in the scene of wherever that crowd is. Number two, the same thing. Simply saying that the backpack is heavy is really not describing how heavy it is. Specifically, we could say that it weighs 60 pounds or something like that. You could be more specific by saying the backpack dragged my back down to the ground or something like that to give a good image. The movie was sad. Again, how sad was it? Was everyone in the movie theater weeping hysterically? And then number four, Troy is funny. How is he funny? Is he doing practical jokes? Is he doing physical comedy? What is it about Troy that specifically is funny? Another problem that students sometimes have is when they take a weak verb and add an ad verb. And so they might say, for example, over here, we spoke quietly. Well, again, there's probably a better way to say that. Take a strong verb and substitute in. Instead of we spoke quietly, say we whispered or they ran quickly. Again, it's okay, but much better. They sprinted. The boys stepped slowly. Well, stepping slowly. Tiptoed is a much better image for your reader. All right. As we did before, here's a couple of examples that you can pause the video and modify. Make stronger. Try to avoid that verb ad verb thing. When we look at these, Andrea spoke loudly so that her friends could hear her at the pet fest. The area that we want to modify this is spoke loudly. We could say, yell, scream, those sort of things. Antonio drove fast. He screeched. He flew. He zapped. He zipped. Someone on a piano there would be cool. Or again, hoping to avoid being seen Leah sat low. Maybe she slouched or some other interesting word to really get the reader into the moment. All right. So to sum up, when we use strong words or strong verbs in our writing, we try to put the reader in the place that you actually are writing about. So look at your own writing. Look for sentences that use weak verbs and remind them. And remember that classic rule, a show don't tell. Don't just say what's happening, but really involve the reader in what you're doing. Thanks. Have a good day.