 Hi, I'm Demira Hayes from the Air Force Research Institute at Air University and welcome to another video in our series, Academic Writing for Airmen. Now in the previous few sessions I've given you some techniques for making your writing stronger and clearer. Remember that your goal in academic writing is to persuade and to inform and writing and strong, clear, direct, prose helps you accomplish this goal, so this video continues to that theme. Now we're talking today about verbs, so I want to rewind back to elementary school just for a moment to make sure we all understand what a verb is. Remember that verbs are words that show action or a state of being. The verbs tell you what the subject is doing in a sentence. Here are some examples, words like fly, explain, decide, write, be, feel, they tell you what the subject is doing. Remember that good academic writing is direct. It doesn't hide its ideas behind extra words. Sometimes in writing we take good, strong, descriptive verbs and we bury them in our sentence by turning them into nouns. This always makes writing worse. It makes your writing clunky and who wants to have clunky writing. So here's a principle of good writing on the screen. Don't bury good verbs inside noun phrases. In other words, don't turn words that should be verbs into their noun forms, and that may not mean a lot to you, so let's look at some examples. The commander gave an explanation of the new policy. What's the real action in this sentence? What is the commander really doing? Is he really giving something? No, he's explaining. The commander explained the new policy. Explain is a great verb, but in the first sentence it's turned into the noun form explanation, and I hope you can hear that the second sentence is more direct and more concise. Let's look at another one. Congress made the decision to fund the weapons program. This is the same thing. Is Congress making something? No, they're really deciding, but here decide is turned into a noun decision, so a better way to write that sentence would be to make decision the verb of the sentence. Congress decided to fund the weapons program. Or you could rewrite it as Congress funded the weapons program and eliminating yet another word. Notice the sentence uses more words when the verb is buried as a noun, but it doesn't say anything more. More words is better in academic writing as long as you convey your meaning accurately. Let's look at another example. This example is based on a sentence that I edited recently for an AU Press publication. The report describes the political, economic, informational, and military actions necessary for the successful accomplishment of the desired end state. Now, where in that sentence is the verb that's been buried as a noun? Throw in on that phrase for the successful accomplishment. Notice how clunky and awkward that sounds. One reason is that accomplish is a verb, and here it's been turned into its noun form accomplishment. So, if you make it a verb and rewrite the sentence as such, the report describes the political, economic, informational, and military actions necessary to accomplish the desired end state. That sounds better, doesn't it? More direct. Notice that I also deleted the word successful. If you accomplish something, aren't you, by definition, successful? So delete that redundant word or that unnecessary word. It doesn't add any extra meaning to the sentence. Okay, in several conflicts since World War II, air operations have caused harm to civilians and destruction of personal property. This one is more subtle. But look at the verb phrase have caused. Have caused what? Have caused harm and destruction. Both words are nouns here, but can't they also be action verbs, harm, and destroy? So, notice how you can improve the sentence, make it more direct by writing in several conflicts since World War II, air operations have harmed civilians and destroyed personal property. It's a subtle change, but I think it makes the sentence more direct and it gets rid of some of the clunk in the sentence. Okay, take a moment to read this paragraph to yourself and look for the verbs that have been turned into nouns. Okay, what did you find? I hope that you noticed in the very first sentence the phrase serves as a demonstration. Remember that demonstrate is a good action verb and so here the sentence will be well served by changing the noun demonstration into the verb demonstrate. Likewise leaders made an attempt. Are they making something? No, they're attempting so you can make attempt the verb. To create plans, well that's fine as far as it goes, but there might be a simpler way to say that by simply saying to plan for multiple scenarios. Neglected to ask questions. You might replace that by neglected to question making the noun questions the verb of that phrase. What you get when you rewrite the sentence like that is the failed mission demonstrates poor planning. Not serves as a demonstration but demonstrates poor planning. Leaders attempted to plan not to create plans but to plan for multiple scenarios but they neglected to question suspect intelligence reports which misled leaders about conditions on the ground. Now I've thrown in something a little different there at the end. The first sentence read gave leaders false ideas. That phrase doesn't have a hidden verb but it's kind of a long and again a clunky phrase. Is there one word, one verb that means to give false ideas? Sure, mislead. So another, you have another chance to kill some wordiness in this sentence by rewriting which gave leaders false ideas as which misled leaders. Okay, so remember the writing principle that we've talked about today is don't bury good verbs inside noun phrases. In other words, don't turn words that should be verbs into their noun forms. This will make your writing stronger, more direct and more concise. Well, we would love to hear from you as always. Please tell us how these videos are helping you and if you have ideas for making them better or if there are topics that you would like us to cover then let us know and you can use the email address that you see on the screen to get in touch with us. Thank you and we'll see you next time.