&quot;Mt. Everest <i>stands</i> 8km tall.&quot; In many cases, it&#x27;s all about moving away from declaring a property of a subject (&quot;X is Y&quot;) to using the verb that causes the subject to exhibit the property.<p>I&#x27;m familiar with this concept but this is the first time I&#x27;ve heard of it formalized with a name, or used outside of creative&#x2F;narrative writing. When I was in high school, a writing teacher made my class perform an exercise to memorize a superset of the &quot;to be&quot; verbs. The rationale was that, while these verbs are direct and objective, they are &quot;flat&quot; and fail to engage a reader.<p>In the case of descriptors&#x2F;properties that simply require too much wrangling to find an appropriate verb - the case of color came up elsewhere in these comments, as in &quot;the barn is blue&quot; - the guiding rule is that those descriptors shouldn&#x27;t be the focus of a sentence in the first place. &quot;The barn was blue&quot; is not interesting enough to stand on its own as a sentence and something else needs to take the verb. &quot;The blue barn loomed over the landscape&quot; or &quot;The blue barn dominated his thoughts.&quot;<p>Writing a Wikipedia article in this style is certainly an interesting exercise, but given the goal of a Wikipedia article I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s a good fit. An encyclopedia entry is not narrative and needs to be direct and objective.<p>As an aside, her exercise proved to be oddly effective, as I can still recite the list from memory: am, is, are, was, were, have, has, had, be, been, being, do, does, did, can, could, shall, should, will, would, may, might, must. :)