A personal essay

On writing like you mean it.

The verbs give it away every time. A writer who has decided sounds different from a writer still negotiating with herself inside the prose.

Hanh D. Brown · 6 min read

A personal essay

On writing like you mean it.

The verbs give it away every time. A writer who has decided sounds different from a writer still negotiating with herself inside the prose.

Hanh D. Brown 5-14-2026

A solitary pyramidal mountain stands above a dark moor under a burning red and orange sunset sky.

In this essay

01 The decision that arrives before the sentence does
02 What the decision actually is when you write it down
03 Why the verbs give it away every time you reach for them
04 The drafts that wait in the almost folder for years
05 A practice, not a rule, and why that distinction matters

The decision before the sentence#

Before a writer commits to a sentence, they have to commit to a position. Most don’t. They write the sentence first and hope the position emerges from it. It rarely does.

What emerges instead is the sound of a person trying to figure out what they think while pretending they already know. I have done this. Most weeks I still do.

What the decision actually is#

The decision is small and unglamorous. It is choosing which sentence to keep when two of them are saying almost the same thing. It is choosing the verb that does the work, even when the gentler verb is more polite. It is letting one paragraph end where it ends, instead of three more sentences that pad the landing.

These are not large choices. They feel large only because every time you make one, you are saying: this, not that. This is the sound my prose makes. This is what I think.

Why the verbs give it away#

You can read it in the verbs. They hedge, they soften, they apologize for themselves. Might. Could. Perhaps. The reader feels the hesitation before they can name it.

The plain sentence has nowhere to hide. It cannot pretend to mean more than it says. That is what makes it hard to write and what makes it worth reading.

The first draft is just you telling yourself the story. Terry Pratchett

Pratchett was being generous. Most first drafts aren’t telling a story yet. They are an extended hum while the brain looks for the door.

A writer who has decided sounds different from a writer still negotiating with herself.

The drafts in the almost folder#

The drafts in my “almost” folder are almost entirely sentences written before the decision arrived. They read like someone clearing their throat for two hundred words. Sometimes I open the folder and find a sentence that has waited two years for me to know what I meant. The sentence was correct. I was not ready.

This is the work. The almost folder is not failure. It is patience, waiting in a file.

A practice, not a rule#

This is not a rule because writing has no rules. It is a practice. Some weeks the decision comes before the sentence. Some weeks the sentence comes first and the decision arrives three drafts later. Both are work. Only one of them reads as work.

When the verbs land, the reader trusts the writer. When they hedge, the reader feels hedged-at. That is the whole of it.

Questions readers ask

Five questions on this essay.

01 What does it mean to write like you mean it?

Writing like you mean it means committing to a position before writing the sentence, then choosing verbs that carry that commitment without hedging. The reader hears the difference between a writer who has decided and one still negotiating. Decided prose uses active verbs and short sentences. Undecided prose hedges with might, could, and perhaps.

02 How do verbs reveal whether a writer has decided?

Verbs are the smallest unit of commitment in a sentence. A writer who chose differs from a writer who suggests. A writer who must differs from a writer who might want to. When verbs hedge, the reader senses uncertainty before they can name it. When verbs land, the reader trusts the writer's position. This happens below conscious awareness but consistently.

03 Why is plain prose harder than ornamental prose?

Plain prose has nowhere to hide. It cannot pretend to mean more than it says. Ornamental prose can drape decoration over an unresolved thought and still feel substantial. Plain prose forces the writer to resolve the thought before writing the sentence. That order of work is what makes it hard. The decision arrives before the language, not during.

04 What is the difference between a first draft and a finished draft?

A first draft is the writer figuring out what they think. A finished draft is the writer telling the reader what they think. The first is private work. The second is public communication. Most prose that fails has not made the journey from first to finished, even after multiple revisions.

05 Can a writer learn to make the decision before the sentence?

Yes, but it is not a rule to follow. It is a practice to repeat. Some weeks the decision comes before the sentence. Some weeks the sentence comes first and the decision arrives three drafts later. Both are work. Only one of them reads as work. The writer who keeps showing up makes the trade-off less often as the years pass.

About the author

Hanh D. Brown, writer.

Essayist writing on craft, voice, aging, and what gets harder to say with the years. Twenty years building AI systems for life-stage decisions. Now writing the publication that has the time to ask why.