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Nominalization: When Verbs Go Bad
By David Bowman
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Robert Roger
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What is Nominalization?
The great thing about verbs is that they are intesting. Verbs provide most of the life to your writing. Nouns, on the other hand, are rather stoic creatures. However, many writers attempt to make their writing seem more professional by changing their verbs into nouns. This is called "nominalization." Avoidance of nominalization will allow your sentences to be more direct, clearer, more graceful, and more powerful. (Yes, If you avoid nominalizing your verbs, your sentences will be...)
At Precise Edit we frequently need to correct this issue, and we offer the information below to help you write well.
Sample:
Consider the following example: "His expulsion by school officials caused serious personal reflection." This has two examples of nominalization, which you can find by identifying the actions, implied or stated. In this case, you will find expulsion, caused, and reflection. Note that caused is already being used as a verb. The other two are being used as nouns. Expulsion comes from the verb expel, and reflection comes from the verb reflect. These two nominalizations make this sample sentence dry, ungainly, and a little tedious to read. They need editing, and you don't have to be a professional editor to do it. We'll show you how.
Solving this problem:
1. The first step to solving this problem (not: the first step of the solution) is to change those nouns back into verbs. This will give you: "His [expel] by school officials caused serious personal [reflect]."
2. The second step is to decide who is doing each action: school officials --> expel, him --> reflect.
3. The third step is to decide who will be the main subject of the sentence. In this sentence, we chose "him". [You may find that you can get rid of some words at this point. If we're emphasizing "him," then we don't need "personal"--that is redundant.]
4. Once you have gone through these steps to edit your sentence, you can create several revised versions of the sentence, such as:
a. He reflected seriously after the school officials expelled him.
b. After he was expelled by the school officials, he reflected seriously.
c. He reflected on his life seriously when the school officials expelled him.
d. Being expelled from school [Maybe officials isn't needed. Who else could expel him from school?] caused him to reflect seriously about his life.
[The easy way to sum up all these steps is to say: Find all your nominalized verbs, and edit your sentences to change them back into verbs.]
The last revision (d) is our favorite, but all these still seem to miss the mark for us. These are still a bit awkward, so we might think about more fundamental changes while editing. For example, if this is a novel or short story, we might write: "How had his life come to this point? How could he ever tell his parents that he had been expelled?"
More examples of editing to remove this problem:
Now that we have gotten this rather complicated example out of the way, let's look at some easier ones.
Their ability allowed them to make many rationalizations. --> They could rationalize many things.
Resistance to the dark side is futile. --> You cannot resist the dark side.
His absolute dedication to his visions resulted in overcoming all his obstacles. --> He overcame all obstacles because he was absolutely dedicated to his vision.
His adoration for her was endless --> He adored her endlessly.
Caveat: Yes, sometimes using a nominalization provides a particular grace to a sentence (e.g., "My acceptance is neither easily given nor lost" instead of "I accept don't accept people easily, but I also don't reject them easily"). A good editor or writer will recognize when this is useful. However, this is pretty rare. If you do use a nominalization, make sure it is the best choice-because it usually isn’t.
When you are ready for professional editing assistance, contact Precise Edit.
David Bowman is the Chief Editor of Precise Edit, a comprehensive editing, proofreading, and document analysis service for authors, students, and businesses. Precise Edit also offers a variety of other services, such as translation, transcription, and website development. |
