Keeping Zombies Out of Your Sentences

Do you ever feel like your writing comes across as convoluted, confusing, and abstract? You may be overusing nominalizations. But you’re not alone—nominalizations are a big problem in academic writing, business writing, emails, nonfiction books, and more. The good news is that nominalizations are easy to recognize and fix once you know more about them!

What are nominalizations?

Nominalizations, also known as zombie nouns, are nouns that contain verbs, adjectives, or shorter nouns within them.

Example nominalizations alongside their verbs/adjectives:

• Recognition ⇨ recognize

• Difficulty ⇨ difficult

• Argument ⇨ argue

• Preparation ⇨ prepare

• Appearance ⇨ appear

• Experience ⇨ experience (sometimes they’re spelled the same way!)

Spot nominalizations by looking for these word endings:

• -tion/sion

• -iable

• -ness

• -ity/aty

• -ance/ence

• -ism

Zombie nouns aren’t inherently bad (in fact, I’d argue nothing in language is bad if used properly). Nominalizations exist because language is flexible, fluid, and adaptive to different needs and contexts—and that’s what makes language so amazing. We have to understand nominalizations better in order to use them well; they exist to communicate abstract concepts, things, processes, or statuses.

Nominalizations can be useful when:

• You’re referring to abstract ideas like “industrialization,” “relationship,” “success,” or, yes, even “nominalization.”

• You need to refer back to a topic or concept you’ve already presented in your piece of writing, such as “This demonstration on grammar will help you write clearly.”

• You want to minimize, generalize, or obscure the do-er of the action, as in “Each staff meeting will begin with a safety presentation.” Here, the nominalization is paired with passive voice!

• You can use a nominalization in place of a noun-verb pair in a dependent clause to cut down on wordiness, like changing “I loved what you recommended” to “I loved your recommendations” or editing “I appreciate it when you participate” to “I appreciate your participation.”

How do nominalizations make writing unclear?

We want to write strong sentences where the subject, verb, and object are as close together as possible and contain the main idea the sentence is trying to communicate. Nominalizations have a very bad habit of breaking down that clear structure and leaving us with weak verbs. Nominalizations also tend to invite in prepositions and unnecessary words that makes a sentence feel convoluted—even when the idea it’s communicating is quite simple.

Help your reader get a clear picture of what you’re trying to say by removing nominalizations and putting the core meaning of your sentence back into the subject, verb, and object. Then you flesh out your main idea with details and context by adding more clauses and phrases.

Let’s correct these sentences together:

• They conducted a thorough review of our policies. ⇨ They thoroughly reviewed our policies.

• The coffee shop has a cozy ambience. ⇨ The coffee shop feels cozy.

• Your explanation was an oversimplification of the problem. ⇨ You oversimplified the problem.

• It impacted my life to a significant extent. ⇨ It impacted my life significantly.

• I think we should come to a decision. ⇨ We should decide.

  • Once you start trimming nominalizations, it’s even easier to cut other unnecessary phrases like “I think.”

Where can I learn more?

If you’re still having a hard time editing nominalizations in your own writing, there’s an amazing tool that can help. Paste a section of text into Writing Well is Hard and it will highlight all the nominalizations for you. From there, you’ll need to parse out the meaning of that sentence and decide whether it could be improved by changing the verb or altering the structure.

Want to read more about nominalizations and clear writing? I recommend two books in particular: Howard Evans’s Do I Make Myself Clear? and Helen Sword’s The Writer’s Diet.

Happy writing!