Nominalisation in history and social science writing_OLD VERSION

The snippet we’ve been looking at this whole lesson using a technique called nominalisation.

It simply means taking a process or quality and talking about it as if it were a thing (by putting it into a nominal group—nominalising it).

So Dee Brown’s snippet contains three nominalisations.

Why use nominalisations?

Efficiency and control.

With nominalisations writers can talk about a lot of events very quickly because they can package them all into one big “thing”.  They can also be very precise about what they want to say about that thing.

Both of these are very important when you want to write about history and cover a lot of ground quickly or show relationships between lots of events. And they are important in scientific writing when you want to describe the relationship between complex processes.