Rule 6: Use Action Verbs

Not all messaging is created equal. It is highly contextual, dependent on audience, environment, medium, and messenger. For those trying to change the world – advocating for a cause greater than themselves and mobilizing others to move big ideas – these mission-driven organizers must follow a different set of rules. Each week, we will unveil our Nine Rules for Movement Messaging. We welcome you to share this with your colleagues and friends. By delivering one rule per week, it is our hope that as advocates and communicators, you can apply them to your own work one by one.

Resumé professionals – i.e. those who make their living rewriting our terrible resumés – will tell you to use action verbs as much as possible. They will tell you that action verbs bring clarity and project a confident tone, appealing to hiring managers. The use of action verbs has a side benefit as well. It helps those uncomfortable with boasting about themselves to, well, boast about themselves. When “contributed to the increase of…” transforms into “successfully planned and executed 15 events, leading to the increase of…,” it places the jobseeker in the center of the action rather than on the periphery.

Social sector advocates are comfortable on the periphery. Sure, we fancy ourselves a collection of grassroots warriors, fearless in the face of our opposition. But when it comes to taking credit, we prefer to spread the wealth, pointing to the “field” or a “collective effort.” After all, we are all part of a larger community of advocates working to make the world a better place. But this tendency can find its way into how we communicate our mission and the work of our organization.

Take a look at your own messaging. Do the words “work to” appear anywhere? What does that even mean? If we are working to ensure a world without poverty, what is it we are doing? It is laudable that we “strive to” do things, but what does that mean? The things we “envision” or even “support” are admirable, but it gives your audience no clearer vision of what it is you do.

Instead, replace those phrases with action verbs. We bring people together. We fight. We achieve things, not just envision them. We fund, organize, and mobilize, not just support. Using action-oriented verbs gives people the opportunity to see themselves in your movement. And there is science behind the effect.

Neuroscientists studying patients with brain injuries have found the parts of the brain used to make meaning of words “depend on cortical regions that either overlap with or lie adjacent to some of the same regions that are engaged during the visual perception of those properties.” In other words, when our brains interpret the words we hear, it isn’t just that we understand what those words mean, we also see what those words mean. We don’t just understand “running,” but we envision the act of running, and even the sound of running.

When we use innocuous phrases like “work to,” we give our audiences very little to grab onto. But when we describe our work in terms of action, our audiences not only understand what we mean, they see and feel the work in action.

See how the Providence Student Union explicitly lays out who they are and what they do.