Square pegs into round holes, or, Turning verbs into nouns

A classic Calvin and Hobbes strip has the following exchange:

Calvin: "I like to verb words."
Hobbes: "What?"
Calvin: "I take nouns and adjectives and use them as verbs. Remember when ‘access’ was a thing? Now it’s something to do. It got verbed. Verbing weirds language."
Hobbes: "Maybe we can eventually make language a complete impediment to understanding."

Verbing does indeed weird language, as does the converse of verbing: nouning.

In the lesson about using active voice, I said that your writing should describe actors performing actions. If you recall your grade-school grammar, verbs are the words we use to describe actions and states of being. If you use more action verbs than state-of-being verbs, you’re doing a good job of using active voice.

All too often, though, speakers and writers take perfectly good action verbs and turn them into nouns, and then go on to describe not action, but states of being. For example: "There will be a reevaluation of the program by the committee." Here, the action verb "reevaluate" has been hammered into a noun by tacking on the suffix "-ion." Since a sentence has to have some sort of verb, the writer enlisted the state-of-being verb "will be" to fill the bill.

Pressing a verb into service as a noun is called nominalization (and here the verb nominalize is itself a victim of nominalization). Don’t worry about remembering this exact term if $25 words give you the heebie-jeebies. Remember the idea though, and remember that turning a verb into a noun almost always makes your writing and speech harder to follow, because it often forces you to use passive voice, and it’s almost always wordier.

Here are some examples before and after de-nominalizing the verbs:

Before: "We will be conducting an investigation…"
After: "We will investigate…"
Before: "The committee has formed a conclusion…"
After: "The committe concluded…"
Before: "The negotiators are in agreement…"
After:  "The negotiators agreed…"

Adjectives can also be the victim of nominalization. Here are a few examples of adjectives and their corresponding nouns:

careless - carelessness
difficult - difficulty
elegant - elegance
equal - equality
intense- intensity
distorted - distortion

There’s nothing wrong with nominalized adjectives in all cases, but they can lead to wordiness. For example, compare "The project is one of complexity" to "It’s a complex project."

Comments

[Julie Rudd]

Amen!! I love the way you write, by the way. I've passed this on to a number of my colleagues.