What Is a Vivid Verb?

  If you want to spruce up your writing by making your sentences more dramatic and vibrant, try using some vivid verbs instead of regular verbs. Vivid verbs are very descriptive verbs that help readers visualize what they are reading by offering a clearer mental picture of the action.
A verb is a word that denotes action and can be written in past, present or future tense. Sentences are made up of a subject and a predicate. The subject is a noun and the predicate typically contains an action of some kind.
Vivid verbs serve one main purpose, which is to make your writing more interesting to those reading it. They also add details to the image a reader makes in his mind while reading something. When writers replace ordinary verbs with vivid verbs, their work becomes more stimulating and readers may actually remember more of what they read because of this.
Look at a sentence to understand how vivid verbs enhance sentences. For example, in the sentence "She walked home," walked is the verb and it shows action in past tense. Walked is somewhat of an ordinary verb making this sentence somewhat boring. By replacing it with a vivid verb like "strolled" changes the sentence to "She strolled home." Notice that the sentence changes, but the meaning is relatively the same. By changing this one word, the sentence seems more interesting and paints a clearer picture in the reader's mind.
There are numerous words that are considered vivid verbs. These words can be interchanged for ordinary verbs, but when doing this, make sure that you are choosing a word that has basically the same meaning. Substituting vivid verbs for ordinary verbs should not alter the meaning of the sentence. For example, change the ordinary verb "work" to "labor" or "toil" to make the meaning clearer. Another example is the word like. Substitute vivid verbs like "admire", "adore" or "cherish" to spruce up your writing.

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