Action nouns: turning nominalizations back into verbs
Academic and professional writing often turns actions into nouns: implementation instead of implement. The result is abstract and slow. This guide shows how to bring the verbs back.
Why it matters
Action nouns make prose abstract: readers have to work out who is doing what, and sentences tend to grow longer.
What you can do
Turn the action noun back into a verb
Find the action hidden in the noun and make it the verb of the sentence.
Ask yourself: What action is hiding inside this noun?
Show an example
BeforeThe committee made a decision to conduct an evaluation of the program.
AfterThe committee decided to evaluate the program.
Give the action a doer
Once the action is a verb, name who performs it.
Ask yourself: Who performs that action? Is that person or thing in the sentence?
Show an example
BeforeImprovement in reading scores followed the introduction of tutoring.
AfterReading scores improved after the school introduced tutoring.
Keep terms of art
Some nouns are the established name for a concept; keep those and unpack the others.
Ask yourself: Is this noun the established name for a concept in your field?
Show an example
BeforeGentrification led to the displacement of residents.
AfterGentrification pushed residents out.
When to leave it as it is
The noun is the established name of a concept your readers know, or the sentence is about the concept itself.
See it in your own draft
Prosemetry reads your Word document and marks the passages where this happens, so you know where to look. It doesn’t rewrite anything; the revising stays yours. Free to try, no account needed.
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