Readers want to know who is doing what.
They need humans and active verbs.
Without them your message withers and dies.
Nominalisations are often to blame – nouns made from other parts of speech that express complex ideas.
They trick unwary writers into killing off simple nouns and verbs and turn prose to sludge.
Here’s an example:
The proliferation of nominalisations in a discursive formation may be an indication of a tendency towards pomposity and abstraction.
Wow. Did you get that?
Seven nominalisation (spot the -ity and -tions).
But the sentence fails to tell us who is doing what.
In her enlightening TEDx presentation, scholar and award-winning teacher Helen Sword explains how nominalisations squeeze the lifeblood from writing and what writers can do to reanimate their work.