Nominalisation: When Verbs-Turned-Nouns Help (and Bury)

Two sentences, both real, both landing in front of tired readers.

The first is a work email that arrives at 4:55 on a Friday: "Following a careful consideration of the matter, a decision has been taken regarding cancellation of the booking." You read it twice and think — so we're not booked any more? The writer meant we've looked at this and we're cancelling, but they've stuffed the sentence with noun-packages until the actual doing is barely breathing underneath.

The second is a line from a school essay: "An exploration of the theme of courage will be undertaken via consideration of the text." Grown-up, isn't it? Marked with a tick, probably. And yet nobody in it is doing anything — it reads like a very polite brick wall.

Here's the thing. Both sentences are pulling the same move, and it has a name: nominalisation — turning a live verb (or, less often, an adjective) into a noun, so the action becomes a thing you can talk about rather than something someone does. Decide becomes decision. Organise [US: organize] becomes organisation [US: organization]. Improve becomes improvement. Formal and bureaucratic writing leans on it hard, and often for good reasons — but let one loose too many times and it smothers the verb, and the energy goes with it.

Nobody's born knowing when to reach for it and when to leave it alone. That's what we'll sort out here — for the essay, the exam answer, the report, and the 4:55 email.

Before you read on, here's where we're heading. By the end of this article, you'll be able to: - Spot a nominalisation in your own writing and in other people's. - Explain why formal writing uses it — for abstraction and density. - Choose when it earns its place and when a strong verb serves you better. - Turn a buried noun back into a verb, and watch the sentence wake up.

Beginner (Foundation)

Let's start plain. A verb is a doing (or being) word — decide, organise, investigate, fail, improve. A nominalisation is what you get when you turn one of those into a noun, a name for a thing or an idea:

• decide → decision
• organise → organisation [US: organization]
• investigate → investigation
• fail → failure
• improve → improvement
• apply → application

So instead of "We decided to leave early," you might write "We made a decision to leave early." Same event — someone is deciding — but in the second version the action has been wrapped inside a noun and set on the table like an object. That's the whole trick.

A few pairs, one from school and one from the working day, to get your ear in:

• The head approved the trip. → We got approval for the trip.
• The landlord increased the rent. → There was an increase in the rent.
• We measured the temperature every thirty seconds. → Measurement of the temperature was undertaken at thirty-second intervals.

You can probably hear it already — the noun versions sound more formal, a touch cooler, a step back from the action. And you meet them all day without the label. Homework packs "work done at home." Meeting, payment, booking, registration — all quietly nominalised, and none of them a problem. The skill isn't avoiding nouns; it's noticing when the package still carries your meaning and when it's just dressing.

So why would formal writing reach for it on purpose? Two honest reasons. The first is abstraction — a science report, a history essay, or a two-page policy needs to discuss recruitment, urbanisation [US: urbanization], or photosynthesis as whole processes, without naming every actor in every line. The second is density — when you're under a tight word count, or the "who did it" is already obvious, packing the doing into a noun lets you say more in less space.

One small thing before we go on. This isn't a lesson in how the words are built — how decide grows into decision, or how a Latinate borrowing sits beside its everyday cousin. That machinery lives with word families over in Pillar 8. Here we care only about the choice: noun or verb, and why.

Quick recap: - Nominalisation turns a verb (or adjective) into a noun — decide → decision. - It often carries endings like -tion, -ment, -ance, -ence, -ity, -al, -ure. - Formal writing uses it for abstraction and density — often for good reason. - The verb version is usually more direct; the noun version is cooler and more distant.

Intermediate (Development)

Once you can spot the swap, the real question arrives: when should you actually use it? And let's be honest — a lot of mark schemes and office style guides quietly reward that packed-noun feel, so "never nominalise" is bad advice. The working rule is gentler: know what the move does to your sentence, then decide whether you still want the verb doing the heavy lifting.

Watch what happens to the shape of a sentence. Nominalisation tends to lift the process into the subject slot and slide the people into a prepositional phrase — or out of the sentence altogether:

1. Students protested about the canteen prices. — clear who, clear action.
2. There was protest about the canteen prices. — the actors have gone; only the event remains.
3. Protest about pricing led to a meeting. — now protest is the grammatical subject, and the people have vanished unless you invite them back.

That vanishing act is why nominalised prose feels so quiet. The energy of a full verb gets replaced by thin scaffolding verbs — make, take, undertake, carry out, conduct, effect, see, have — propping up the noun that stole the verb's job:

• made a decision → just decided
• undertook a review → reviewed
• conducted an investigation → investigated
• there was a failure to → we failed to / X failed to

Sometimes the denser abstract noun genuinely earns its keep. In a geography report you want urbanisation, deforestation, migration — those nouns are the topics, and naming a whole process once lets you measure it and argue about it. In a performance report, retention and onboarding are the actual items on the plan. But if every live verb on the page has been deflated into a fancier noun, your reader stops seeing people and starts seeing fog.

Here's where school and working writers most often trip:

• The essay opening that announces the process instead of the point. "An exploration of the theme of courage will be undertaken…" → "Shakespeare shows courage as costly, not glamorous…"
• The soft refusal. "It is not possible to bring about a change in the timetable at this stage." → "We can't change the timetable now." Politeness can stay; fog needn't.
• The buried instruction. "Attention is drawn to the requirement for completion of the form prior to attendance." → "Please complete the form before you attend."

Common Mistake: Treating every nominalisation as automatically "more formal, and therefore better." Formality is a tool. Burial is not formality — and a tired teacher or a busy manager can tell the difference at a glance.

Pro-Tip: Read the sentence aloud. If you can hear a real person doing something and your meaning still lands, keep the verb. If you genuinely need the abstract thing — decision, growth, conflict, evidence — so you can hang two or three points off it, nominalise on purpose.

Quick recap: - Nominalisation shoves the real actor out of the subject slot and props the sentence on empty verbs (make a…, undertake a…). - Keep it when the abstract process is the topic (urbanisation, analysis, retention). - Cut it when you still need energy, clarity, or a clear human doing the action. - The read-aloud test catches most of the damage.

Advanced (Mastery)

At the top end you stop asking "is nominalisation good or bad?" and start asking a better question: what am I putting in the topic slot, and what social relationship am I building with my reader? Because that's what the choice really controls — not just word class, but which idea the reader treats as given, solid, up for discussion.

It helps to hear nominalisation as one of the dials that sets register. Watch the same little event climb the ladder:

• I messed up, said sorry, and they forgave me. — casual.
• I made a mistake and apologised, and they accepted it. — conversational.
• My error was addressed through apology, and its acceptance was gratifying. — formal, and getting noun-heavy.
• The rectification of the operational error was effectuated through appropriate discourse. — costume, not craft.

Each step swaps live verbs for nouns and adds distance. Institutions — councils, universities [US: colleges], big employers, exam boards — love that distance, because systems outlast individuals. The cancellation of the trip can be discussed without pointing at Ms Patel. Staff turnover can be measured without naming names. Sometimes that's fair and even ethical — privacy, continuity, talking about processes rather than personalities. And sometimes it's simply evasion, and readers learn to smell it. A vague "lessons will be learned" after a failure of oversight rarely reassures anyone who lost the money or the time. Naming the agent, where it's safe and true, is what rebuilds trust.

A few edge cases worth carrying with you:

• Topic control. "The government's decision shocked voters" puts decision centre-stage so you can pin consequences to it. "The government decided, and shocked voters" puts the agents there instead. Skilled writers move that spotlight scene by scene.
• Lexicalised nouns. Some nominalisations have become words in their own right — communication, leadership, friendship, discovery, equilibrium. You'd never say "our communicating with partners improved," and oxidation in a chemistry write-up isn't a posh verb, it's the tool of the trade. Using these doesn't stiffen your prose; it just makes it normal. The problem is only ever optional burial, where a clear verb was standing right there.
• Chains of "of." Three or four of-phrases in a row — the results of the analysis of the impact of the introduction of… — almost always flag smothered verbs you should revive. If you spot three nominalisations stacked with prepositions, stop and restructure.
• Nominalisation plus passive — peak fog. These two travel together, and together they bury the meaning completely. "An investigation was conducted into the complaint" becomes "We investigated the complaint." "The implementation of the system was carried out by the IT department" becomes "The IT department implemented the system." When editing, do a quick scan: highlight the -tion and -ment nouns, look for a companion passive (was conducted, was made, was carried out), and rewrite with an active verb and a clear subject. Nine times in ten the sentence sharpens.

One honest confession. I still have to prune this out of my own drafts — decades of copy-editing non-fiction train you to love a tidy noun cascade, and then a paragraph lands stone dead because nobody in it is doing anything. When that happens, don't panic. Put the people back in the subject slot and watch the sentence open its eyes again.

Common Mistake: Using nominalisation to dodge an agent when the agent is knowable and relevant. "A decision has been made to reduce staffing" hides who decided; "We've decided to reduce staffing" owns it. Readers treat the first not as professionalism but as spin.

Pro-Tip: Draft verb-first — messy, direct, full of people doing things — then nominalise selectively afterwards, only where topic position or a multi-point argument needs a solid "thing" to hang on. Energy first, packaging second. Writing that starts from the abstract rarely recovers its pulse.

Quick recap: - Advanced use is about topic control, the ethics of depersonalisation, and genre fit — not ornament. - Lexicalised and technical nouns (leadership, equilibrium) earn their keep; empty cascades are costume. - Chains of of and the nominalisation-plus-passive combo are where clarity goes to die. - Power-sensitive writing — feedback, customer replies, public statements — usually needs live agents and verbs.

A note on UK and US English

There's no real grammatical split here worth inventing. Both varieties use nominalisation the same way, for the same reasons, and both overdo it in bureaucratic settings. What changes is spelling — organisation [US: organization], centralisation [US: centralization], analyse [US: analyze] — and house style. Some school systems and some industries push a denser, more "corporate" or "passive lab" voice than others, but that's disciplinary or institutional culture, not a national rule. Write for your reader, not for the map — and be consistent.

Key Takeaways

• Nominalisation turns a verb or adjective into a noun — decide → decision, fail → failure — so the action becomes a discussable thing.
• Formal writing leans on it for abstraction and density, often legitimately.
• Overused, it hides the actor, empties the verb (make a decision), and drains the energy — worst of all alongside the passive voice.
• Test it by reading aloud, or by asking who is doing what? If you can't tell, you've probably buried it.
• The goal isn't to ban nominalisation but to use it on purpose — live verbs for energy and contact, solid nouns for focus and systems talk.

Check Your Understanding

1. Rewrite to restore a clear verb and actor: "An investigation of the bird population was conducted by the class."

2. Underline the nominalisation, then give a verb-based rewrite: "There was a reduction in the training budget."

3. Which sentence is more direct, and why? (a) "A decision was made to increase the budget." (b) "They decided to increase the budget."

4. After a service outage, which line is more trustworthy for customers — and why? (a) "A thorough review of protocols will be undertaken." (b) "We'll review our protocols this week and write to tell you what we're changing."

5. True or false: nominalisation is always more formal, so a good essay or report should use as much of it as possible.

Answer key

1. "The class investigated the bird population." Wording can vary — the point is an actor plus a live verb.

2. Nominalisation: reduction. Rewrite: "We reduced the training budget."

3. (b) is more direct — it names the actor and uses an active verb. (a) hides who decided behind a noun and a passive.

4. (b) — a named agent (we) and a concrete time (this week) rebuild trust; (a) is a classic package that usually signals delay and dodges responsibility.

5. False. Formality is a tool, not a target. Piling up nouns buries the action and the actor — good formal writing uses nominalisation selectively.

Where to Go Next

• Pillar 9 Hub — style, register, and choosing the right English for the job.
• P9 · 2.3 — the passive voice and agency, nominalisation's constant travelling companion.
• P9 · 3.2 — clarity versus abstraction, and how to keep a formal sentence readable.
• Pillar 8 — word families and word formation, where the decide / decision / decisive machinery is taught.