Verbs are the soul of a sentence. They carry the action. The intent. Nouns are the heart. They identify, quantify. Together they form the nucleus of the sentence. Adjectives and adverbs junk it up. Detract from the mission of the single sentence. Yes, I know Faulkner wrote sentences that spanned a paragraph or even several pages, but you can bet he relied on the engine of nouns and verbs. Keep the subject of the sentence, the noun, as close as possible to its counterpart, the verb. The shortest distance between two things is straight line, so imagine that your sentence is that line. Get to the point with as few words as possible. Map the trajectory; imagine the arc as clean as the flight path of an arrow–the moment it’s released into the air.
If you are blocked, or if nothing but adjectives and adverbs come to mind, make a list of action verbs to carry the soul of your sentence: run, walked, bled, sang, danced, imagined, dreamed, stretched, flew, eviscerated, macerated, detonated, chopped, cut, drank, ate, Now make a list of nouns, name words, that you can marry to the action: cake, girl, man, woman, storm, war, love, peace, brother, father, sister, poodle. Ruthlessly edit out clauses, adjectives, and adverbs. Keep the sentence lean and mean. Keep it clean and tight. Nouns and verbs will never fail you, but modifiers will lead your writing into the fog of cliches, and worse, obfuscation, This method keeps you on your toes. Are you making your point? Is the arc simple, clean and beautiful? Yes, I just used a series of three adjectives, but at this point, they are subordinate to the nucleus.
