Eliminate Nominalizations

? Ugur Akinci

Last night (March 27, 2019) we enjoyed yet another STC Washington DC Baltimore Chapter’s Competition Awards Banquet. (In case you are not aware of it, STC WDCB is running a great technical documentation competition for over 20 years now and it's still going strong. Make sure you submit your document for a great document award in this year’s competition. See https://competition.stcwdc.org/)

Banquet’s Featured speaker was Alan Houser (https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/alanhouser/), a veteran technical communicator, a former STC President and an accomplished consultant who needs little introduction.

In his informative presentation about STC’s great tech writing Certification Program (https://www.stc.org/certification/), Alan shared with us his top-three criteria to quickly assess whether a technical document is good enough to pass the minimum threshold of excellence or not.

One of those criteria is nominalization, or that is, its absence. A good tech document should not resort to nominalizations.

But what is “nominalization” exactly?

Here is a brief introduction and some examples.

Nominalization is the habit of turning verbs and adjectives into nouns. You should eliminate it not only from your technical documents but from all your writing.

Nominalization is the name grammarians have given to turning direct verbs into convoluted nouns or phrases by adding suffixes like –tion, –ment, etc.

Nominalization is a problem not only for the native-speakers of English but those who read the translated versions of the same document.

When technical documents are translated and localized, nominalized phrases become major sources of error.

Here are some selected examples to illustrate the point.

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to have reservations about

“I have reservations that it’s true.”

BETTER: “I doubt that it’s true.”

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to make a suggestion

“He made a suggestion that we switch panels.”

BETTER: “He suggested we switch panels.”

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to make a decision

“We made a decision to upgrade our software.”

BETTER: “We decided to upgrade our software.”

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to lead to the destruction of

“The experiment led to the destruction of the X45 circuit.”

BETTER: “The experiment destroyed the X45 circuit.”

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to result in delay of

“Insufficient funds led to the delay of the project.”

BETTER: “Insufficient funds delayed the project.”

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to reach an agreement

“We reached an agreement to stop the experiment on August 4th.”

BETTER: “We agreed to stop the experiment on August 4th.”

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to offer (or, give) an explanation for

“He offered a good explanation for the anomaly.”

BETTER: “He explained the anomaly well.”

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to result in delay of

“The snow storm resulted in delay of all flights.”

BETTER: “The snow storm delayed all flights.”

——————————————

to perform an audit

“The HR team performed an audit of all time cards.”

BETTER: “The HR team audited all time cards.”

——————————————

to effectuate a system shut-down

“The PM effectuated a system shut-down to prevent a melt-down.”

BETTER: “The PM shut down the system to prevent a melt-down.”

Write tight. Stay bright. Serve right.

For free writing tips and tutorials, visit https://www.technicalcommunicationcenter.com