Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
Verb Nominalization
Discover Discovery
Impair Impairment
Allow Allowance
Agree Agreement
Study Study
All verbs turn into noun when we add ing; these were called gerunds way back when:
Remember that every sentence has both story elements (characters/action) and traditional
sentence elements (subject/verb). When you nominalize the action of a sentence,
you conceal that action in a noun. This requires your reader to translate the
sentence into more easily comprehensible story elements, and thus makes your prose
seem obscure. Notice also that nominalizations generate excessive use of prepositional
phrases. In every case, to edit, we merely turn the nominalization back into a verb, find a
subject for it, and recast the sentence:
A defect which involves the possible failure of a frame support plate may exist on
your vehicle. This plate (front suspension pivot bar support plate) connects a portion of
the front suspension to the vehicle frame, and its failure could affect vehicle directional
control, particularly during heavy brake application. In addition, your vehicle may
require adjustment service to the hood secondary catch system. The secondary catch
may be misaligned so that the hood may not be adequately restrained to prevent hood fly-
up in the event the primary catch is inadvertently left unengaged. Sudden hood fly-up
beyond the secondary catch while driving could impair driver visibility. In certain
circumstances, occurrence of either of the above conditions could result in vehicle crash
without prior warning.
In general you should avoid nominalizations in your prose. But its not always wrong
to employ nominalizations; in fact there are several instances in which they are useful.
Here are a few of them:
(a) The nominalization is a subject that refers to something in the previous text:
(b) The nominalization names what would be the object of its verb:
(c) The nominalization is a standard technical term or a bit of insider talk. When a
nominalization is a term you and your reader use all the time, dont change it to a
verb. Examples include terms like standard deviation and debt financing. Heres
a sentence written by a law student:
In a civilian request for a discovery in an action involving liability for negligence
by the military, there is a requirement for a showing of a level of need higher
than in other cases.
Four of the first five nominalizations seem to be legitimate insider terms, but two of the
last three are not:
You need to know the difference between active and passive voice. You have probably
been told by English teachers, Always use active verbs. Thats not a useful rule.
Passive verbs can create problems for your reader if you use them at the wrong timeif,
for example, a passive verb leads you to hide the agents of actions at the end of sentences
or, worse, to drop them out altogether. But the passive voice exists for good and useful
reasons. You can also create problems for your reader if you use active verbs instead of
passive ones at the wrong time. Just remember that readers can follow your story most
easily when you use the active voice to say whos doing what.
In the active voice, the agent of the action is the subject of the sentence, and the receiver
or goal of the action (the actions object) follows the verb:
In the passive voice, the receiver or goal of the action is the subject of the sentence and
the agent appears, if at all, in a prepositional phrase. Moreover, in the passive voice the
verb includes a form of be and the main verb is in its participle form:
Once your verb is in the passive voice, notice that you can drop the agent out of the
picture entirely:
The passive voice can have negative consequences. When you use passive verbs where
you should use active ones, youre more likely to hide crucial actions in nominalizations
and bury or omit the agents of those actions:
If this objective can not be met with the current documentation, then revision and
improvement of the manual are needed.
If users can not meet this objective with the current documentation, then the
company will need to revise and improve its manual.
However, there are some good reasons to use the passive voice. Professional writers
often make strategic use of the passive voice:
(1) to avoid a long subject. You might use the passive voice when you need a lot of
words to name the agent and you dont want to have a long subject. Even though this
tends to hide the agent, shorter subjects generally make clearer sentences.
(2) to avoid naming the agent. You may decide to use passive voice when you dont
know who did it:
You may also use the passive voice when you dont want to assign (or admit)
responsibility. Kids, corporations, and governments learn this early:
(3) to shift the focus from the agent to another character. You might use the passive
voice when you and your readers dont care who the agent of the action might be. In
the following example, we dont care about the anonymous trial attorney who acts as
agent:
At the trial Dr. Smith was forced to acknowledge that the report was more
reliable than his own diagnosis.
This is also the case in much of scientific and technical writing, where neither you nor
your reader care about whos doing the action: