Nominalization – Style #5

Last but not least for the category of STYLE. I’m wordy so this one is important to me. I tend to add unnecessary words where they’re unneeded. I find them where I could easily be restructured to become a simpler sentence. I had a count of 127 errors in writing Style. If you missed a previous blog, you can click on the purple link here that is crossed out to see that blog post.

Within STYLE are the following issues I had in my story:

1. Unclear Antecedent .
2. Capitalization at the start of a sentence .
3. Incorrect Spacing .
4. Incorrect Spacing with punctuation .
5. Incorrect verb form .
6. Inflated Phrase .
7. Wordiness .
8. Nominalization

 

In the last blog, I talked about Inflated Phrase and Wordiness. Nominalization is similar to them.  I only had one incident of Nominalization show up.

I’m going to defer to Grammarly’s explanation for Normalization:

Usually, we use verbs to talk about actions. But many verbs have noun counterparts that refer to actions. These noun counterparts are called nominalizations. Using nominalizations often results in long phrases like make a decision instead of decide or put forward a suggestion instead of suggest. These phrases can weigh down your writing and make it harder for your readers to understand what you’re saying. A single verb is usually more expressive than a phrase.

The character is actually speaking to a group of people so I would need to keep that in mind when correcting this.

“So you state that you saw nothing.”

This would actually work for a group or just one person. This is very similar to wordiness and inflated phrase.

Since I only have one of my own examples to use I’ll give a couple more.

Wordy This instruction may cause confusion for our students.
Concise This instruction may confuse our students.

Wordy Tony gave his lover a glance.
Concise Tony glanced at his lover.

My advice about nominalization:

Simplify your writing to make it more clear. While it may ‘feel’ like you’re being professional or intelligent it’s unnecessary to complicate things. 

-Sheryl

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