By Archana Choudhary, MSc, Aerospace Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Let us look at the general process to write a successful paper. You have done the research, agreed that you are going to write a paper to tell your findings, and planned your manuscript. That sounds like the correct process, but doesn’t exactly sound right. Let us try again. You have performed the research, decided to publish a paper to report your findings, and structured your manuscript. Both sentences convey the same meaning, but the second one clearly does so more effectively. Why? The secret to a great article is not only the pioneering concepts you report and the way you structure them. As shown in the simple example above, the language you utilise in your paper is a significant factor in how impactful your paper is. Needless to say, the language must be formal and academic, and the terminology must be appropriate for your field of study. However, for a paper to be truly outstanding, it is essential that the points are articulated intelligently and succinctly. A vital tool for this is the effective use of verbs. Research papers often involve the description of processes and methodologies, which makes it even more important for the specific action word to be used. This article provides recommendations on how you can select suitable verbs for your writing project. First, let us briefly review what verbs are. A verb is one of the most important parts of a sentence, and indicates an action, or a state of being. The boldfaced words in the previous sentence are verbs. More often than not, it is impossible for a sentence to be constructed without a verb. Moreover, there are many kinds of verbs, such as action verbs (that express specific actions), auxiliary verbs (helping verbs that show a verb’s tense or if the verb is positive or negative), and modal verbs (auxiliary verbs that express abilities).