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Clutch, weep, glare, jerk, loathe. These verbs sound well and push forward. They are short, yet tell much about the action they refer to. When fulfilling writing assignements writers have to pay much attention to the selection of appropriate words relevant to their themes. Among the parts of speech it is verbs on which the success and enjoyability of most of the writings depend. An essay with many effective verbs will delight its readers, while another essay built up by sentences that contain overused and less informative verbs will make the reader lose interest.
My aim in analyzing 5 Proficiency Essays written in the English Department of Janus Pannonius University in May 1997 was to find out whether the type and number of verbs used in the essays influenced the evaluation.

Method
To conduct the analysis I collected five Proficiency Essay that differed in the scores from five up to nine. I examined them focusing on the use of verbs. For doing so I took into account three aspects. First I counted how many times passive forms appeared in the individual essays, then I wanted to find out whether the testees could make their texts vivid by selecting effective verbs. At last I compared the essays on the basis of the frequency of the appearance of 'be' forms.

Discussion and Results
According to Zinsser verbs are the most important of all your tools (11), the tools a good writer can make use of. That is why it can be assumed that the type and number of verbs used in the essays may have influenced the evaluation. The best essay, which was awarded with 9 scores out of 10 shows a fluent writer with good English proficiency. Only three times did s/he use the passive voice, s/he rather concentrated on selecting effective and active verbs which push hard and carry sentiments. " They would go for one , single catastrophe, an explosion of a problem great enough to sweep harmony away." "The poor creature cannot just sit still and resist all the temptations and provocations of the world." (66,1) The testee introduced his/her topic sentences by using ' be' forms but it did not become characteristic of the essay. "Destruction is the very basis of human nature." "There are basically two ways of ruining a perfect Christmas." (66,1) Only the writer of this essay achieved the maximum two scores in vocabulary, which might have resulted from that the testee could express him/herself with short and effective verbs specific to the theme.

The essay on How to Survive a Hollywood Movie (39) presented the largest number of passive forms among the five essays. Though "the difference between an active-verb style and a passive-verb style - in pace, clarity and vigor - is the difference between life and death for a writer.” ( Zinsser 110) This testee must have ignored this difference between the two types of verbs as s/he often used passive forms, sometimes creating a few clumsy phrases. Passive verbs "tug fitfully" ( Zinsser 111 ) in phrases such as: "their hair suddenly become thoroughly combed" or "it must be made sure"(39,1) They interrupt the fluency of the text as well as the inaccurate use of the verb ‘secure’ in the following context: "There is no time to secure him about her similar feelings."(39,1) The testee confused the meaning of ‘secure’ with that of ‘assure’s which resulted in the creation of this awkward sentence.

Essays (46), (32) and (53) had one feature in common, they presented an overuse of 'be' and 'have' forms. In essay (32) 'be' and 'have' forms occurred eighteen, in essay(32) sixteen and in essay (53) fifteen times. Texts overrun by expressions like: 'there are', 'it is quite a', 'has a fear of' and 'it is not' lose their vitality and originality and will make the reader lose interest in reading. To elaborate on their theme these candidates used mostly basic and everyday verbs, such as: ( buy, work, go, get).

The essay on How to Survive a Hollywood Movie (46) contained - apart from 'be' and 'have' forms - only twenty-five verbs out of the five hundred words written by the testee. The following lines reflect well the overall style of the essay: "Life would not be complete without Hollywood, Hollywood would hardly be Hollywood without rage."(46,2)The text lacked vivid verbs that could give it dynamics but exceeded in the use of verbs which express intellectual activities, such as : ( know, reckon, mean, suppose ). The verb ‘know’ occured three, ‘reckon’ two times in the text, though their appearance was irrevelant to the topic of the essay.
By analyzing essay(32) the same tendency can be noticed, the candidate often used copulas and verbs related to thinking, though s/he managed to involve more effective verbs in his/her composition than the previous testee. Sometimes the testee came up with some concrete language and with concrete verbs: " do not forget to wrap the presents"(32,3) or "spoil the whole feast" (32,1).

'Be' forms appear in essay (53) too, though less often. This text is almost free of passive forms. The testee describes every little detail of the Christmas preparation by using active verbs. "She cuts her finger", "pulls the poor girl’s hair" and similar phrases push the text forward and give it vitality.

In general, when evaluating vocabulary skills testers have to pay attention to that whether the words - including verbs, nouns, adjectives and adverbs - are well-chosen and relevant to the theme of the essays. Apart from the use of verbs the type and number of nouns adjectives and adverbs also influence the assessment. When I looked at the scores awarded to Vocabulary skills I found that only essay(66) got the maximum 2 scores, all the others received 1 score. However, the one-score-essays differed a lot in the use of verbs. The narrow score limit did not allow the testers to lay much emphasis on verb use; they had to give scores on the basis of the average of Vocabulary skills. That is why the differences concerning the choice of verbs among the one- score-essays cannot be expressed directly in the evaluation of Vocabulary skills. They rather become conspicuous by looking at the total scores achieved by the candidates.

I found that the essays - on account of less effective verbs - gradually lose their vitality and rhythm in proportion to the decrease of the total scores. The top-scorer essay reveals a writer with good English proficiency who excelled in vocabulary and in the use of vivid and effective verbs as well. Testers awarded 8 scores to essay(39), 7 scores to essay(53), 6 scores to essay(32) and 5 scores to essay(46). From the analysis it turns out that essays(39) and (53) presented more vivid verbs than essays(32) and (46) and that the latter two were overrun rather by adjectives and nouns than by verbs.

Conclusion
I have presented five Proficiency Essays and then concluded that the type and number of verbs have influenced the final assessment. As I have looked at only few essays I have not had enough evidence of the reliability of my results. Analyzing other essays might modify my results.