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down the hallway, story in hand, he looked up to see the Brobdingnagian figure of Jimmy Breslin, who agreed to take a peek at the problem.
    "Too many -ings" said the legendary columnist.
    "Too many whats?"
    "Too many -ings."
    Can a writer use too many words that end with -ing, and why should that be a problem?
    To put it another way, why is "Wish and hope and think and pray" stronger than "Wishin' and hopin and thinkin' and prayin' "? With apologies to Dusty Springfield, the answer resides in the history of English as an inflected language. An inflection is an element we add to a word to change its meaning. For example, we add -s or -es to a noun to indicate the plural. Add -5 or -ed to a verb, and we distinguish present action from the past.
    Add -ing to a verb, and it takes on a progressive sense — a happening, as in this 1935 description by Richard Wright of the wild celebration after a Joe Louis boxing victory (the emphasis is mine): "Then they began stopping street cars. Like a cyclone sweeping through a forest, they went through them, shouting, stamping ." The passage survives the weak verb "went through," depending on a simile and those -ing words to create a sense of spontaneous action.
    Consider this opening to the mystery novel The Big Sleep:
    It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.
    Even though author Raymond Chandler uses the static "was" five times, he creates a sense of the present — the here and now — by the injection of -ing words.
    So the writer should not worry about the occasional and strategic use of an -ing word, only its overuse when the simple present or past tense will suffice. Sometimes a single -ing creates the desired effect. In this passage from a biography of U.S. Senator Bob Dole, we learn of the care he received after a terrible war injury:
    Bob held on, and made it through the operation. The fever disappeared and the other kidney worked, and by fall, they'd chipped away the whole cast. Now they were trying to get him out of bed. They hung his legs over the edge of the mattress, but it made him weak with fatigue. It took days to get him on his legs, and then he shook so, with the pain and the strangeness, they had to set him back in bed.
    Using the simple past tense, Richard Ben Cramer creates a scene that is vivid, clear, and dramatic. There, in the middle, rests a single exception ("they were trying") to describe immediate and continuous effort.
    Let me attempt to write a paragraph with too many -ings:
    Suffering under the strain of months of withering attacks, reservists stationed in Iraq are complaining to family members about the length of their tours of duty, and lobbying their congressional representatives about bringing more troops home soon.
    There is nothing right or wrong about this sentence. It's just heavy on -ings, five of them, expressing a variety of syntactic forms:
    • "Suffering" is a present participle, modifying "reservists."
    • "Withering" is an adjective, modifying "attacks."
    • "Complaining" and "lobbying" are progressive forms of verbs.
    • "Bringing" is a gerund, a verb used as a noun.
    Before I try to improve this passage, let me offer two reasons why -ing weakens a verb:
    1. When I add -ing, I add a syllable to the word, which does not happen, in most cases, when I add -s or -ed. Let's take the verb to trick. First, I'll add -s, then -ed, giving me tricks and tricked. Neither change alters the root effect of the verb. Tricking, with its extra syllable, sounds like a different word.
    2. The -ing words begin to resemble each other.