Words Fail Me by Patricia T. O'Conner

merchandise was stowed in the cargo hold.
    â€¢Â When you'd rather not say who's responsible:
My homework
has been lost.
    â€¢Â When you don't know whodunit:
Norman's manuscript
was stolen.
    â€¢Â When you want to delay the punch line:
Julia
was done in
by a spinach soufflé.
    In most cases, though, a passive verb sits there like a plaster Buddha, one step removed from the action. The sentence
Their meal
was eaten
in three hours
is a snooze. You can hear the clock slowly ticking.
    An active verb has more energy, more buzz; it gets to the point sooner and with fewer words. The sentence
They ate for three hours
has blood in its veins, not embalming fluid. You can imagine hungry people gobbling and snarfing. Life, my dear, is being lived, if I may be allowed a passive verb.

8. Call Waiting
PUTTING THE SUBJECT ON HOLD
    I can't stand call waiting, an annoying necessity at our house. I get discombobulated when I have to interrupt one conversation and start another, and maybe even another, then try to pick up where I left off.
    Sentences can be confusing and disorienting, too. The subject is mentioned early on, then comes some other stuff, and maybe some other stuff, and by the time the verb shows up we've forgotten who's on hold. Putting a subject too far from the verb is asking the reader to take another call in mid-sentence.
    Here's what happens when a verb falls too far behind:
Taking up his meerschaum, Holmes, secure in the knowledge
that Moriarty's goose was cooked, popped it into his mouth.
That's a confusing sentence, and not because it's too long. It's disorienting because the subject (Holmes)in too far from the verb (
popped
). What did Holmes do? We assume he put the pipe into his mouth, but for all we know, he might have popped the goose into Moriarty's.
    The solution is to bring the actor (
Holmes
) and the action (
popped
) closer together:
Taking up his meerschaum,
Holmes popped
it into his mouth, secure in the knowledge that Moriarty's goose was cooked.
The sentence is just as long, yet there's no way to misread it.
    If putting subject and verb close together is so easy and works so well, why do writers separate them? Perhaps they think it's less clunky to cram a lot of information in the middle of a sentence than to tack it on either end. Not true. Most of the time, it's smoother and clearer to put extra information at the front or the back than to lump it in the middle.
    Even when we understand a sentence, we can often improve it by moving the subject and verb closer together. Keep your eye on the actor and the action in this example: Drew,
seriously ticking off the personal trainer who was helping her drop twenty pounds for her role as a bulimic princess,
ate
a whole quart of Cherry Garcia.
    If this sounds awkward, it's because we have to wait so long to find out what happened. There's too much information crammed in between the actor (Drew)and the action (ate). By the time we learn what Drew did that was so off-ticking, we've had a bit of a workout ourselves. Now let's put the doer next to what's being done: Drew ate
a whole quart of Cherry Garcia, seriously ticking off the
personal trainer who was helping her drop twenty pounds for her role as a bulimic princess.
    That's still a mouthful, but isn't it better? By keeping subject and verb near each other, you're dealing with one idea at a time. You aren't asking the reader to take another call, to put a thought on hold while you interrupt with more information.
    There's a bonus here that goes beyond the sentence. Once you get into the habit of avoiding digressions on a small scale, you'll be able to spot them in larger chunks of writing. Just as the parts of a sentence sometimes get separated or out of order, so do the ideas that hold together paragraphs, chapters, even whole books. Hold that thought.

9. Now, Where Were We?
A TIME AND A PLACE FOR EVERYTHING
    Did you ever wake up in the middle of the night, maybe while traveling or on vacation,