Here is a sentence: “The implementation of the new system will require the facilitation of employee training and the achievement of full integration.” Now here is the same sentence with the fog removed: “We need to train employees and integrate the new system.” The second version says exactly what the first says. It says it in nine words instead of twenty-two. And it is immediately clear where the first is immediately murky. The only difference between them, technically, is nominalization: the habit of converting verbs and adjectives into abstract nouns and building sentences around those nouns instead of around the actions they originally expressed.
Nominalization is arguably the single most common writing problem in professional, academic, and bureaucratic prose. It is so endemic to formal writing that most people have stopped noticing it, even as they struggle to read through it. Understanding what it is, why it happens, and how to reverse it is one of the fastest ways to become a cleaner, clearer, more persuasive writer.
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What Nominalization Actually Is
The term comes from the Latin nomen, meaning name or noun. Nominalization is the grammatical process of forming a noun from another part of speech, typically a verb or an adjective. English is unusually fertile ground for this, because it offers multiple suffixes that convert almost any verb or adjective into a noun with minimal effort. The verb decide becomes the decision or the decisioning. The verb implement becomes the implementation. The adjective significant becomes the significance. The verb fail becomes the failure, or in more bureaucratic contexts, the failure mode occurrence event.
The resulting nouns are called zombie nouns, a term popularized by Helen Sword in her 2012 book Stylish Academic Writing. The name is apt. They look like the actions and qualities they came from, but the life has been removed. They absorb surrounding verbs that have no real content, converting sentences that should be doing things into sentences that merely point at things that were being done by someone, at some point, in some unspecified manner.
How to Recognize It
A few diagnostic signals make nominalization easy to spot once you know what you are looking for. Watch for heavy use of the suffixes -tion, -ment, -ance, -ence, -ity, and -ness. Words ending in these suffixes are frequently nominalizations of more active originals. Watch for forms of the verbs to be, to have, and to make carrying the conceptual weight of a sentence: “there is an expectation that” instead of “we expect,” or “it has the capability to” instead of “it can.” Watch for sentences where the agent, the person or thing doing something, has disappeared entirely, replaced by abstract nouns acting as grammatical subjects.
Why Nominalization Happens
It would be convenient if nominalization were simply the result of laziness or poor education. The reality is that it is actively produced by the incentive structures of formal writing. In academic writing, nominalization signals intellectual seriousness. The more abstract and noun-heavy your prose, the more it resembles the writing of established scholars in the field, which creates pressure toward abstraction regardless of whether abstraction serves clarity. In bureaucratic writing, nominalization provides cover. A passive, agent-free sentence cannot be held accountable in the way an active sentence naming a subject can. “A determination was made” diffuses responsibility in a way that “I decided” does not. This is often not accidental.
There is also a cognitive dimension. When writers are working out complex ideas, nominalizing often happens because it allows them to handle abstract concepts as objects that can be moved around and related to each other. “The implementation of the recommendation” is a thing that can be tracked, scheduled, and referred to. At the drafting stage, this can genuinely serve thinking. The problem is that many writers never return to revise the nominalized draft into readable prose, treating the working-through-ideas version as the final version.
The Real Cost of Zombie Nouns
The effects of heavy nominalization on readers are measurable and consistent. Sentences built around abstract nouns are slower to process, require more working memory to parse, and are more likely to be misunderstood or simply abandoned. This is not because readers are unsophisticated. It is because the human brain is wired to process action, agents, and verbs efficiently. We are narrative creatures. We track who did what to whom. Sentences that bury actions inside abstract nouns force the brain to reconstruct the underlying event that the nominalized version has obscured, and that reconstruction takes effort that readers have limited patience for.
In professional contexts, the cost is not merely aesthetic. A proposal that buries its arguments in nominalized abstraction is less persuasive than one that states them directly, because the reader cannot easily track the logic. A report that describes “the realization of efficiency gains through the optimization of resource allocation processes” is communicating less clearly than one that says “we saved time by reorganizing how resources are assigned,” and the gap in clarity is a gap in persuasive power.
How to Fix It
Reversing nominalization is a mechanical skill that improves quickly with practice. The core technique is to look for the verb hiding inside the abstract noun and rebuild the sentence around it.
Start by identifying the main nominalization in a sentence. Ask: what verb or adjective did this noun come from? Then rebuild the sentence with that verb doing the grammatical work, and give it a subject. “There was a failure to communicate” becomes “we failed to communicate” or “they did not communicate clearly.” “The achievement of consensus was facilitated by the moderator” becomes “the moderator helped us reach agreement.”
Not every nominalization needs to be cut. Some abstract nouns are doing genuine work: referring back to something previously established, serving as a technical term with precise meaning, or genuinely denoting an abstraction that has no cleaner expression. The goal is not to eliminate all nouns derived from verbs but to use them deliberately, when they earn their place, rather than reflexively, because bureaucratic or academic habit has made them the path of least resistance.
Strong writing is not a matter of complex vocabulary or impressive sentence architecture. It is mostly a matter of letting actions be actions and letting the people who perform them take their place as subjects. When you do that consistently, the prose does not just get shorter. It gets honest.