Helping verbs — also called “be verbs” or “auxiliary verbs” — are the structural glue that tie together your active verbs.

Although necessary in moderation, an excess of helping verbs can indicate sections of your text that describe the action at a distance: passive voice, predicate nominative or predicate adjective constructions, indefinite tenses, etc.

They’re often used to describe a state-of-being (“John is tall.”) rather than an act-of-doing (“At 6‘8”, John towered over us all.”)

You can’t eliminate helping verbs entirely — or you'd sound like a crazy person — but you can use the Helping Verb Highlighter to find hot spots where you might be over-using those auxiliaries, and decide for yourself whether there’s a more active way to rewrite your sentences.

To learn more about how Shaxpir identifies helping verbs, read the article How Part of Speech Analysis Works in the Shaxpir Guidebook.

The Helping Verb Highlighter is just one of the many Linguistic Highlighters we offer exclusively to Shaxpir Pro users.

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