Sentence Structure Course: Get Ratioed

How Many Verbs You Should Be Using

In the course, we've been focusing on verbs. But how many verbs should you be using? Well, I've analyzed many of the best writers and figured out that all the best ones have an identical verb-to-sentence ratio. Figuring out how many verbs you use per sentence is an analytical way (obviously not perfect) to assess the strength of your writing.

There are exceptions and outliers to this rule. But, in general, most of the best authors, when they turn up the stylistic heat, write at over a 2.0 verb-to-sentence ratio.

FYI: Your verb ratio doesn’t matter when writing dialogue, transition scenes, and other slower parts of your story.

This lesson is for when you want to write beautifully.

There isn't an automatic correlation to better writing if you use more verbs, but if you know what you're doing, there is a pattern. While looking at 100+ passages today, I observed around 20% under 2.0 (most of them were 1.8 or 1.9, though). But those were exceptions even in their own work. The median was around 2.5.

For today's assignment, I want you to pick a passage you're proud of—the most beautiful one you've published on Substack. Don't post something too long. Don't use a dialogue section or a scene that is muted or slowed down on purpose.

I then want you to count the number of verbs in the passage and the number of sentences. Divide the number of verbs by the number of sentences. So, if your passage has 25 verbs and 10 sentences, your verb-to-sentence ratio is 2.5.

Post your passage and your ratio in the comments below!

Some examples of this are below.

This is a passage from Nabokov.

"In the brilliant air the match burned with an invisible flame and from its sulfur a sweetish taste spread to his tongue. Thus, sitting on a rock and listening to the brook’s gurgling, Martin enjoyed his fill of viatic freedom from all concerns: he was a wanderer, alone and lost in a marvelous world, completely indifferent toward him, in which butterflies danced, lizards darted, and leaves glistened—the same way as they glisten in a Russian or African wood."

Sentence 1: Verbs: "burned," "spread"

Sentence Two: Verbs: "sitting," "listening," "enjoyed," "was," "danced," "darted," "glistened," "glisten"

Verb Ratio: 5

Elizabeth Bowden: 3.0 Ratio

“That morning’s ice, no more than a brittle film, had cracked and was now floating in segments. These tapped together or, parting, left channels of dark water, down which swans in slow indignation swam. The islands stood in frozen woody brown dusk: it was now between three and four in the afternoon. A sort of breath from the clay, from the city outside the park, condensing, made the air unclear; through this, the trees around the lake soared frigidly up. Bronze cold of January bound the sky and the landscape; the sky was shut to the sun—but the swans, the rims of ice, the pallid withdrawn Regency terraces had an unnatural burnish, as though cold were light. There is something momentous about the height of winter. Steps rang on the bridges, and along the black walks. This weather had set in; it would freeze harder tonight.”

Haruki Murakami: 2.0 Ratio

“Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn’t something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn’t get in, and walk through it, step by step. There’s no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That’s the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.”

Cormac McCarthy: 3.0 Ratio

"Come evening he tracks a spire of smoke rising oblique from among the low hills and before dark he hails up at the doorway of an old anchorite nested away in the sod like a groundsloth. Solitary, half mad, his eyes redrimmed as if locked in their cages with hot wires. But a ponderable body for that. He watched wordless while the kid eased down stiffly from the mule. A rough wind was blowing and his rags flapped about him."