I wrote recently about the hierarchy in your sentences — the idea that verbs and nouns carry the most weight, and that where you place them in a sentence determines how much force they actually deliver. (If you haven’t read that post, it’s a good place to start.)
Today I want to get more specific, because there’s one pattern I see constantly in coaching sessions, and once you learn to spot it, you’ll find it everywhere in your own drafts.
The pattern: your strongest, most vivid verbs are living inside dependent clauses while your main clause coasts on something ordinary.
How Strong Verbs Get Buried in Dependent Clauses
Here’s a sentence a writer might draft:
She stared at the long line of guests waiting to be let inside.
On first read, that seems fine. There’s a character, there’s an image. But look at the verbs. The main verb — the one doing the structural work of the sentence — is stared. That’s a perception verb. It points the camera outward. It tells me what she’s looking at, not what’s happening.
Meanwhile, waiting is tucked inside a participial phrase modifying guests. It’s the verb that actually creates the image — a crowd of people standing around, restless, not yet admitted. But grammatically, it’s decoration. It’s an adjective clause describing the direct object. It has no structural authority in the sentence.
The writer chose a vivid verb and then buried it.
Here’s another:
When he jerked the door open, it made an unnerving clicking sound.
The strong verb here is jerked — it’s physical, it’s specific, it implies force and urgency. But it’s living inside a dependent clause that starts with when. The main clause — the part that can stand alone as a sentence — is it made an unnerving clicking sound. And made is about as weak as verbs get.
Its subject is also weak (“it”). Just a two-letter pronoun. The door actually did the thing, but the main subject of the whole sentence? “It.”
The sentence has its priorities backward. The best words are in the passenger seat while the weakest words are driving the car.
Why Writers Bury Strong Verbs
Writers don’t do this on purpose. I think it happens because when you’re drafting, you’re often thinking about the sequence of events — this happened while that happened, or this happened which caused that. And the natural way to express simultaneity or causation in English is through dependent clauses: when, while, as, because, after, before.
The problem is that dependent clauses are grammatically subordinate by definition. Whatever you put in them is presented to the reader as secondary information — background, context, modification. Even if the content is vivid, the structure is telling the reader: this isn’t the main event.
So you end up with sentences where the main clause says something bland (she stared, it made a sound, he was standing) and the dependent clause contains the action you actually wanted the reader to see.
It’s also connected to the rushing habit. When you stack two actions into one sentence using a dependent clause, you’re compressing what could be two distinct beats into a single moment. The sentence moves faster, but the strong verb loses its impact because it doesn’t get its own space.
All this also chips away at your reader’s confidence in you as a writer and lowers Reader Capital. The underlying message is I don’t know if I’m worthy of your time. Do you?
How to Fix Buried Verbs With Sentence Structure
The revision is almost always the same: break the sentence in two and let the strong verb be the main verb of its own sentence.
When he jerked the door open, it made an unnerving clicking sound.
Becomes:
He jerked the door open. It made an unnerving clicking sound.
Now jerked is the main verb of its own clause. It lands harder. The reader sees the action first, then hears the result. And you’ve eliminated when, which was forcing the reader to hold two things in mind simultaneously rather than experiencing them in sequence.
Or take this:
Gripping the wheel so tightly that her fingers ached, she drove along the highway.
The main clause is she drove along the highway — generic, flat. The interesting material — the tight grip, the aching fingers — is in a participial phrase. Flip the hierarchy:
She gripped the wheel until her fingers ached. The highway stretched ahead in the early morning light.
Now the physical tension leads. The verb gripped is doing the main work. And the highway gets its own sentence where it can set the scene without competing for attention.
How to Find Buried Verbs in Your Draft
Pull up a page of your current draft and try this:
For each sentence, find the main clause — the part that could stand alone. Underline the main verb. Then look at whatever else is in the sentence: the dependent clauses, the participial phrases, the prepositional chains. Are there stronger, more vivid verbs hiding in those secondary structures?
Here are the words that typically start a dependent clause. If your sentence opens with one of these, there’s a good chance your best verb is buried:
When, while, as, after, before, because, since, although, if, by, upon
And watch for participial phrases — those -ing constructions that attach to the main clause:
Gripping the railing, she… Running through the options, he… Noticing the change in his expression, she…
In each of those, there’s a strong verb (gripping, running, noticing) that’s been demoted to a modifier. The question is always: does this verb deserve its own sentence?
Often, the answer is yes.
Applying Sentence Hierarchy to Strong Verbs
This is really the Hierarchy of Your Sentences in action. That post lays out what kinds of words carry the most weight. This one is about where those words end up structurally — and how to promote them when they’ve been buried.
The principle is simple: your strongest verbs should occupy the strongest grammatical positions. Main clauses, not dependent ones. Sentence beginnings and endings, not the middle of a participial phrase. The primary action of the sentence, not a modifier describing something else.
When you find a strong verb in a weak position, you don’t need to find a better word. You need to give it a better seat.
If you want to practice this with examples and exercises, I go over this in more detail in my course Show, Don’t Tell. Learn more and grab a copy of the course here.
