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By contrast, “is” and other forms of the verb “to be” provide an equal sign between the subject and the predicate but otherwise tell us nothing about the relationship between them. “To be” is an intransitive verb; it cannot take a direct object. Compare the two preceding transitive examples with the following versions of the same sentences using forms of the verb “to be.”

John F. Kennedy was effective at the manipulation of his image in the media.

Thomas Jefferson’s idea was for America to be a country of yeoman farmers.

Rather than making things happen through an active transitive verb, these sentences let everything just hang around in a state of being. In the first version, Kennedy did something—manipulated his image—but in the second he just is (or was), and the energy of the original verb has been siphoned into an abstract noun, “manipulation.” The revised Jefferson example suffers from a similar lack of momentum compared with the original version: the syntax doesn’t help the sentence get anywhere.

Certain situations, however, dictate the use of forms of “to be.” For definitions in particular, the equal sign that an “is” provides works well. For instance, “Organic gardening is a method of growing crops without using synthetic fertilizers or pesticides.” As with choosing between active and passive voices, the decision to use “to be” or not should be just that—a conscious decision on your part.

Table 18.1 Static and Active Verbs

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Action Hidden in Nouns and “To Be” Verbs Action Emphasized in Verbs

The cost of the book is ten dollars. The book costs ten dollars.

The acknowledgment of the fact is increasingly widespread that television is a replacement for reading in American culture. People increasingly acknowledge that television has replaced reading in American culture.

A computer is ostensibly a labor-saving device— until the hard drive is the victim of a crash. A computer ostensibly saves labor— until the hard drive crashes.

In the laying of a fl agstone patio, the important preliminary steps to remember are the excavating and the leveling of the area and then the filling of it with a fine grade of gravel. To lay a fl agstone patio, first excavate and level the area and then fill it with a fine grade of gravel.

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If you can train yourself to eliminate every unnecessary use of “to be” in a draft, you will make your prose more vital and direct. In most cases, you will find the verb that you need to substitute for “is” lurking somewhere in the sentence in some other grammatical form. In the preceding sentence about Kennedy, “manipulate” is implicit in “manipulation.” In Table 18.1, each of the examples in the left-hand column uses a form of “to be” for its verb (italicized) and contains a potentially strong active verb lurking in the sentence in some other form (underlined). These “lurkers” have been converted into active verbs (italicized) in the revisions in the right-hand column.

Clearly, the examples in the left-hand column have problems other than their reliance on forms of “to be”—notably wordiness. But as Richard Lanham first articulated in his excellent Revising Prose (Longman, 2006), “to be” syntax tends to encourage circumlocution and verbosity. Lanhan named this kind of writing “The Official Style,” and he attacked it for its flabbiness, which he traced to its addiction to forms of “to be,” the passive voice, and strings of prepositions in place of concrete verbs in the active voice (see the next section). Lanham’s proposes a series of steps, which he calls The Paramedic Method, for doing triage on Official Style sentences. He instructs writers to mark all of the prepositions, identify the forms of to be, find the action buried in the sentence and make it into an active verb.

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Try This 18.8: Finding the Active Verb

Take a paper you’ve written and circle the sentences that rely on forms of “to be.” Then, examine the other words in these sentences, looking for “lurkers.” Rewrite