http://www.ck12.org Chapter 7. Tone and Style
Characters and Actions
When your writing highlights important sentence elements, such ascharactersandactions,your sentences become
clear to your readers and naturally draw their attention. Charactersare sentence elements that trigger actions or
events. They can be concrete (a person, animal, or thing) or abstract (an issue, a concept, etc.). Characters are
usually nouns or pronouns. Actions describe what characters do or what events they trigger.Actionsare expressed
by verbs. These concepts are illustrated in the examples below:
Example 1-Jack’srefusal to leave the worksite resulted in his boss’sdecision to call security.
Example 2-BecauseJackrefused to leave the worksite,hisbossdecided to call security.
Consider the following differences between the sentences in Example 1 and Example 2.
a. Thecharactersof Example 1,Jackandhis boss, are part of the subject, but they do not receive the main focus
in the sentence. Thefocilie in the wordsrefusalanddecision.
b. Thecharactersof Example 2,Jackandhis boss,receive focus in the subject of each respective clause, and
theiractionsare expressed by the verbsrefusedanddecided,instead of in the nounsrefusalanddecision.
Example 2 characters are aligned with their actions.Notice that Example 1 draws readers’ attention to the abstract nounsrefusal anddecision. Even though it is
possible to use abstract nouns as characters when you write about abstract issues, this example shows that it can
be a bad decision when you use them in lieu of clearcharacters and theiractions.
The alignment between characters and their actions makes sentences like Example 1 more powerful. It is easy to
turn type-1 sentences into type-2 ones. All you need is to play a simple game of verbs and nouns, as shown in the
table below.
Review Questions
- The following table contains pairs of nouns and verbs. Complete it with the missing elements. This table will
be also useful when we discuss nominalization (Lesson 9).
TABLE7.4:
Noun Verb Noun Verb
decision decide describe
express explanation explain
analysis conclusion