Maybe you’ve heard the advice: Write with nouns and verbs.
It’s good advice for fundraising too. Especially the verbs part.
Here’s a helpful post about this very basic (but oddly difficult) piece of writing advice from Publication Coach at Do strong verbs power your writing?
The challenge is this: “Weak” verbs are necessary to hold your writing together. There’s no real way to get rid of them. The trick is to replace weak verbs with strong verbs when you can.
Here are some weak verbs:
- is
- was
- am
- were
- being
- are
- get
- got
- have
- had
When you use one of these, ask yourself: Is there a stronger way to say it with a different verb?
Sometimes the answer is no. So you move on.
Other times, you’ll realize a different verb -- one that describes action -- might work better. This is just a quick question to ask yourself that can make your writing more interesting and more persuasive.
Special note for fundraising: One danger of using “strong” verbs is that they are sometimes not colloquial verbs.
Better weak and colloquial than strong and not natural!
