Lesson overview

Introduction
UNIVERSAL
Young adult and up
nominalisation
social science writing
history writing
essay
verbal conjunctions
functional grammar
information density
word economy
academic writing
compression
grammatical metaphor
condensing information
precision
nominalising events
nominalising processes
nominalising qualities
efficiency
connectors
noun groups
This lesson explores nominalisation, one of the fundamental language patterns we use to increase information density in history and science writing. (If you don't understand nominalisation, you'll have trouble writing an effective academic essay.) Since effective nominalisation relies on extensive domain knowledge, the goals for this lesson are modest. We want to introduce the concept, show how important it is, help students recognise it in the field, and help them develop just a rough sense of what it feels like to successfully compress your language. Even though the writing load in this lesson is light, it uses a lot of highlighting and discussion, and is probably most effective when lead by a teacher.