JAN. NEWSLETTER: Verbs make your writing vivid - Susan Weiner Investment Writing

I was struck by this advice in Alexander Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel:

You want vivid writing. How do we get vivid writing? Verbs, first. Precise verbs. All of the action on the page, everything that happens, happens in the verbs.

According to Chee, writer Annie Dillard told her students to “increase the average number of verbs per page.” Strong verbs allow you to avoid using adverbs to fill in what your verbs fail to convey, as Chee says later in the same chapter of his book.

I discovered an interesting exercise from Dillard in Chee’s book. Dillard told her students to print the draft of an essay. Next, follow these steps, as described by Chee:

… cut out the best sentences … and tape them on a blank page. And when you have that, write in around them. … Fill in what’s missing and make it reach for the best of what you’ve written so far.

I might try that exercise with a personal essay with which I’m struggling.

Speaking of essays, here’s an essay I wrote long ago: “A Pink Kimono From a Japanese Mother.”

Punctuation with quotation marks

I frequently find that writers misplace quotation marks around their other punctuation, as I discussed in “Bloggers’ top two punctuation mistakes.”

If you’re puzzled by the rules of when to punctuate inside or outside quotation marks, review this nice summary about “Punctuation with Quotation Marks” on the website of the library of Loyola Marymount University.

Fact versus interpretation in your blog posts

Fact or interpretation, which should you place first in your article, commentary, or blog post? For my take on this, read “Financial writer’s clinic: fact vs. interpretation.”

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Research denials of health care claims

Difficulties with health care claims have been in the news lately.

If you’d like to find out why a claim was denied, try using this Claim File Request from ProPublica. I haven’t used it myself, but ProPublica is a respected investigative journalism organization.

Happy 2025!

I hope that 2025 is a healthy, happy, and prosperous year for you.

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