It's all in the verbs

Verbs go beyond the "formal railway line of sentence" to help people "feel or think or dream", wrote Virginia Woolf. During the second world war, she wrote this sentence in her diary: "Thinking is my fighting." Apart from the possessive pronoun, it consists of verbs or verb forms.

But like any skilled writer, Woolf varies sentence lengths. She alternates her long, elastic thought refrains with shorter fragments.