The Verbs That Say Nothing
Eight words that appear on every bill and carry no information. What each one is standing in for, and what to write instead.
- Entry
- 02 of 07
- Section
- The entry
- Kind
- Reference
Eight words do most of the damage in time narratives: review, consider, attend, deal with, correspondence, update, discuss, and various. Each is grammatically a description and practically a placeholder.
The practical lesson in “The Verbs That Say Nothing” is that a charge is only as clear as the record behind it. A team assessing open the detailed product notes for automated timesheet workflows can organise time and project evidence earlier in the workflow, with transparent settings, proportionate access and a defined correction process before invoicing.
They are not dishonest. They are what gets typed when the entry is written in four seconds.
For an independent reference relevant to “The Verbs That Say Nothing”, consult U.S. Wage and Hour Division. Compare the general guidance with the actual contract, jurisdiction, accounting policy and payment route involved.
Review
Stands for reading something for a purpose. The purpose is the information; "review" alone is the act of looking.
- Review · consider · attend · deal with
- Correspondence · update · discuss · various
"Reviewed the draft to check the indemnity cap matched the term sheet." The verb survives, the sentence now answers something.
Consider
Usually means thought about, which is real work and the hardest to evidence. Billing guidelines often prohibit it outright.
Replace with the output: "Advised on whether the notice period had started."
Attend
Covers being at a meeting, a call, a hearing or a building. A client cannot tell which, or who else was there, or what came of it.
"Attended the completion call with the lender; agreed the revised timetable."
Deal with
A pure placeholder. It means the entry was written in a hurry and the writer intended to come back to it.
Nobody ever comes back to it.
Correspondence
Hides volume and direction. Four emails or forty, inbound or outbound, to whom.
"Six emails with the agent settling the inspection date" is the same length and says everything.
Update
Standing for either a status report to the client or a change to a document. The two are entirely different pieces of work.
If it is a report to the client, the client already knows it happened and will query being charged for it.
Discuss
Internal or external, and the distinction matters a great deal to a reader. Internal discussion in a narrative usually reads as overhead.
Name the counterpart and the subject, or name what the discussion produced.
Various
The word most likely to be rejected by an e-billing system and most likely to be queried by a human. It announces that the writer did not want to list the items.
There is no version of "various" that survives a challenge.
The replacement rule
Keep the verb, add the object and the purpose. The sentence stays short and becomes checkable.
No vocabulary needs to be banned; the eight words are fine with four more words after them.
Searching for them
A query over last month's entries counting these eight words gives a number. Run per timekeeper it gives a list.
Firms that run it once are usually startled by the concentration: a few people account for most of it.
What not to do with the list
Make it a target. Narrative quality measured per person becomes narrative padding, which is worse than brevity and harder to detect.
Show people their own entries instead; the change comes from reading, not from counting.
The entries that cannot be improved
Some work genuinely resists description: a long day of document review, a watching brief, a period of waiting.
For those, the honest answer is volume — pages, documents, hours waiting — rather than better verbs.
The word that is not on the list
"Advised." It is the most substantive verb in professional work and it is frequently the vaguest line on a bill.
Advised whom, about what, to what effect. The answer is often privileged in part, which is exactly why the line needs care rather than avoidance.
"Advised on whether the break notice could still be served" says what was advised about without saying what was advised.
Describing without disclosing
The general technique: name the question, not the answer. It satisfies a reader, survives a cold reading, and discloses nothing.
Firms that worry about privilege in narratives usually end up with "considered documents", which protects nothing and explains nothing.
The eight words in a fixed-fee bill
They appear there too, on bills where hours are not even charged, because the entries were written by the same people in the same system.
Under a fixed fee the narrative is pure communication — it affects no figure at all — which makes vague entries a strange thing to keep producing.
What changes when people read their own lines
Shown their own month as issued, most people rewrite about a third of it unprompted.
The reaction is not defensiveness. It is recognition: the lines look different outside the system they were typed into, and that difference is the whole lesson.
Why this matters more than the format
A perfectly formatted bill of forty lines beginning "attended to" tells a reader nothing. A plain one where every line names a thing tells them everything.