See you next time - Writelike

Nominalisation is a tough topic. It uses a lot of grammatical and lexical (i.e. words) knowledge, like:

Understanding noun groups
Sentence structure
Derivation (i.e. turning one word into another word)
Summary and abstraction (i.e. turning lots of words into one word)

… and that’s even before getting to specific content knowledge like special coinages.

So if you’ve made it all the way here, congratulations!

The goal of this lesson was not to make you a master nominaliser. That will come with practice, observation, and knowledge-building.

Instead, we hope you feel a bit more confident reading dense non-fiction texts, have some appreciation of why they might be written that way, and have a few skills to help you make your own writing more controlled and efficient.

Look for nominalisations, even in novels or short stories. You’ll find them everywhere. When you spot one, think about why the writer chose to use a nominalisation instead of a verb or adjective.

We rewrote a section from this article in the Conversation (a website that publishes articles written by academics and other experts for a lay audience): Science communicators need to stop telling everybody the universe is a meaningless void, by Chris Ellis

See you next time!