Summary

The article advises writers to eliminate perception verbs, also known as filter verbs, to create more immersive and direct writing.

Abstract

The article "Master the Art of Writing by Axing These Verbs" emphasizes the importance of avoiding perception verbs to enhance the quality of writing. These verbs, which include sensory and cognitive actions like "to see" or "to think," create a filter between the reader and the narrative, diluting the reader's experience. By listing common perception verbs related to the five senses and thought processes, the article illustrates how these verbs can make writing feel distant and less engaging. The author provides examples of how rephrasing sentences to remove these verbs can lead to stronger, more immediate prose, ultimately making the writing more vivid and compelling. The article encourages writers to identify and remove these verbs during the editing process, suggesting that while they may initially make writing easier, they ultimately detract from the reader's immersion in the story.

Opinions

Perception verbs are considered clumsy, inelegant, and lazy, creating unnecessary distance between the narrative and the reader.
These verbs hinder the illusion of immediacy, reminding readers that they are consuming a story rather than experiencing it.
The author, referencing Jay Squires, views perception verbs as "wannabe assassins" of good writing.
The article posits that attention should be on what is being perceived rather than the narrator's perception, advocating for a more direct connection between the reader and the story's events.
While acknowledging that perception verbs can sometimes be acceptable, the author suggests that they should be used sparingly and ideally removed during editing for the sake of stronger storytelling.

Master the Art of Writing by Axing These Verbs

These sneaky filter verbs are making your writing difficult to connect with

Perception verbs, also called filter verbs, don’t make your writing bad, but they can make it awkward and unpleasant.

What are perception verbs?

Perception verbs are verbs (so far, so obvious) that describe a narrator’s experience.

Jay Squires calls these verbs wannabe assassins in his great article “Don’t Distance Your Readers by Leaving Your Subtitles Turned on”.

What’s so wrong with describing a narrator’s experience?

Describing a narrator’s experience is a fairly essential part of writing, but there are ways to do it well and ways to do it badly.

Perception verbs are clumsy and inelegant, but worst of all, they’re lazy.

They make your job as a writer easier but create distance between your writing and your reader, hence the term “filter verbs”. These verbs filter the experience you’re describing and dilute it.

They also break the illusion of immediacy. You want to write immersive stories, and your readers want to read immersive stories, but perception verbs remind readers that all they’re doing is staring at a page or screen.

Can I have a list?

Perception verbs fall into two categories: ones related to the five senses and ones related to thought processes. Here’s a non-exhaustive list.

The five senses:

to glance
to look
to notice
to see
to stare
to watch
to hear
to listen
to taste
to smell
to experience
to feel
to touch

Thought processes:

to decide
to know
to note
to realise (realize, if you’re American)
to recognise (recognize if you’re American)
to remember
to seem
to think
to understand
to wonder

Basically, if you’re more focused on the narrator’s perception than what is being perceived, you’re doing it wrong.

Remember that our attention gravitates towards verbs, and notice that perception verbs aren’t all that interesting.

How about some examples?

Josie heard a car door slam and noticed the headlights shining through her window. She thought it odd that David had returned home so early.

A car door slammed, and headlights shone through Josie’s window. David didn’t usually return home so early.

Getting rid of perception verbs won’t take away meaning, but it will convey the scene with stronger verbs and make everything more direct.

It also gets rid of a lot of unnecessary words.

Manon saw the open diary abandoned on the floor. When she got nearer, she saw her name written on the first page and noticed a series of strange symbols drawn around it.

The diary lay abandoned and open on the floor. Manon edged nearer. Her name curled across the first page, surrounded by strange symbols.

Removing perception verbs allows for better clarity and often an increased sense of urgency. Rather than Manon standing between readers and the diary, readers see the diary directly, as if they’re looking through Manon’s eyes.

If you need more examples of how to get rid of perception verbs, you can find them at the end of this article, where I have a list on how to deal with each verb.

Perception verbs hold readers at arms’ length, but they make writing easier — or at least more straightforward.

Let yourself write as many of them as you want in your first draft. Then hunt them down and delete them when you edit.

There will be times (very, very rare times) when filter verbs won’t be the worst thing that’s ever happened to your writing, so don’t worry if you have one or two that refuse to budge.

If you’d like to receive a quick and actionable writing tip once a month in your inbox, sign up to my newsletter!

Have a great day!

Sources: