Nominalization: Turning Actions into Nouns

Recognize dense academic sentences built from noun forms of verbs, and unpack them.

Nominalization turns a verb or adjective into a noun: decide becomes decision, fail becomes failure, analyze becomes analysis, important becomes importance. Academic and official writing uses nominalizations heavily because they let writers treat processes as things that can be discussed, compared, and measured. But stacked nominalizations can make sentences dense and hard to follow, and they can hide who did what. Worked example: 'The implementation of the reduction in funding resulted in the elimination of the program.

' Every key idea is a noun: implementation, reduction, funding, elimination. To unpack it, turn the nouns back into verbs and supply the actors: 'When the board reduced funding, it eliminated the program. ' The unpacked version is shorter and names the board, which the original hid. As a reader, unpacking nominalizations helps you understand dense textbooks. As a writer, use nominalizations when you need to name a concept, but prefer active verbs when you are describing what someone did.

• 1Nominalization turns verbs and adjectives into nouns.
• 2Stacked nominalizations make text dense and can hide actors.
• 3Unpack them by restoring verbs and actors.