Tag Archive - Nominalization

Turning Verbs into Nouns May Be Bad for Your Writing

In the previous post on nominalizations, I talked about how nominalizations are formed and briefly touched on a general approach to remedying them. In this post, I’ll explain ways to identify and correct specific nominalizations, as well as point out some legitimate uses of nominalization.

Nominalization is a fancy word that means taking a part of speech such as a verb, adjective, or adverb and turning it into a noun—primarily at the head of a sentence. Doing this can lead to some weak sentence structure.

Watch out for nominalizations that follow a verb:

  • The auditors conducted an investigation into the embezzlement
  • Better: The auditors investigated the embezzlement

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