Nominalisation

The grammar of compression

Before we get into nominalisation, let's talk about the idea of compression.

Here is the last snippet from the previous page again.

In recent years, there has been much discussion of participatory mapping and the democratization of cartography. Today participatory mapping is usually considered a product of the GIS era as it involves groups of people who gather information that is then mapped using GIS. The democratization of cartography refers to anyone with a computer being able to make a map; thus, maps are no longer the sole province of the "professionals".

Women in American Cartography: An Invisible Social History(2019)

We agreed that when writing gets more broad and abstract like this, it can feel dense and hard to read.

So why do it? Why would you write in a way that you know is harder to read?

To answer that, let's see what happens if we try to rewrite this snippet in a more concrete, conversational style.

In recent years, everyone has been talking a lot about what it means that a large and diverse group of people are drawing and contributing to maps. Most people think that it is because it is easier these days for everyday people to collect the information, and then use special software like GIS to process it. All anyone needs to make a map now is a computer, which is very democratic compared to before, because we don't just get maps that are drawn by a small group of professional map makers.

One way to look at it is that the rewrite feels a little easier to read, but that comes at a cost:

  1. Because more focus is put on people, it's actually harder to see the relationships between the concepts.
  2. It takes more space to write the same amount of information.
  3. Even though we're trying to use simple, concrete terms like in a narrative recount, we don't have any specific details, so we don't get that midst-of-the-action effect that makes the recount style so compelling.

Both these snippets convey the same information, but they feel quite different to read.

What's making that difference?

We can find an answer by taking a closer look at the underlying grammar. Specifically, the noun groups, verb groups, and connectors.

First, toggle the highlighting on our "less conceptual but easier to read" version:

In recent years, everyone has been talking a lot about what it means that a large and diverse group of people are drawing and contributing to maps. Most people think that it is because it is easier these days for everyday people to collect the information, and then use special software like GIS to process it. All anyone needs to make a map now is a computer, which is very democratic compared to before, because we don't just get maps that are drawn by a small group of professional map makers.

Just visually, to begin with: when you look at the highlighting, how would you describe what you see?

Do you notice how busy the highlighting is? We see many examples of each colour, evenly spread throughout.

That means we have an even spread of noun groups, verb groups, and connectors. I guess that's what you'd expect from a text describing the complex relationships between technology and social movements, right?

But compare that highlighting to the "more conceptual but harder to read" original snippet:

In recent years, there has been much discussion of participatory mapping and the democratization of cartography. Today participatory mapping is usually considered a product of the GIS era as it involves groups of people who gather information that is then mapped using GIS. The democratization of cartography refers to anyone with a computer being able to make a map; thus, maps are no longer the sole province of the "professionals".

Women in American Cartography: An Invisible Social History(2019)

Woah. At least from a highlighting perspective, the original actually looks simpler than the rewrite. It has half the verb groups and connectors of the original.

What we're seeing is a powerful grammatical move.

The writer is compressing all those complex relationships down, so that instead of verbs and connectors, we have more densely packed noun groups.

This kind of compression is called nominalisation.

Here's something interesting.

When we highlight the noun groups, verb groups, and connectors in the first dramatic, in-the-action, narrative recount of John Snow and his map that we saw, we get this:

In his mind Snow was already drawing maps. He'd imagined an overview of the Golden Square neighborhood, with a boundary line running an erratic circle around the Broad Street pump. Every person inside that border lived closer to the poisoned well; everyone outside would have had reason to draw water from a different source.

Notice this extract isn't nearly as busy as the patchwork-coloured worked example we provided above.

In fact, the highlighting is even cleaner and simpler than the supposedly compressed snippet about participatory mapmaking.

What's the deal?

The genius of nominalisation is that it lets us write about complex abstract events and processes (like participatory mapping and the democratisation of cartography) as if they were concrete things (like John Snow and the Broad Street map).

Without nominalisation, we'd struggle to explain these abstract ideas, and our writing would get more wordy and convoluted (like the patchwork-coloured example above).

This lesson isn't about the complex features of noun groups, but it will help you a lot if you can recognise where a noun group starts & ends.

Here’s a quick explanation of the different components of noun groups:

Main noun - the thing in question (could be concrete, like ‘map’, ‘computer’, or more abstract, like ‘cartography’, ‘information’)

Pointer - tells us which thing/who’s thing (‘a’, ‘these’, ‘John Snow’s’)

Quantifier - tells us how many things (‘lots of’, 'four', 'many')

Describers/Classifiers - adjectives or nouns that tell us more about the thing (‘recent years’, ‘GIS era’)

Qualifiers - add complex details about the thing, often using prepositional phrases (‘anyone with a computer’, ‘special software like GIS’)

Focus - added to the start of a noun group to focus on a specific aspect of the thing (‘an overview of the Golden Square neighborhood’, 'the democratisation of cartography')

For more background info

Check out the Noun groups lesson for more examples and explanations of noun groups and their components.

Prepositional phrases are tricky beasts!

If you don't know what they are:

  • Prepositional phrases basically tell us the circumstances surrounding an action.
  • They consist of a preposition—in, on, by, at, and so on—plus a noun group (usually).
  • Prepositional phrases can modify verbs (‘Every person lived closer to the poisoned well’).
  • Or they can modify nouns (‘Every person inside that border’)

In this lesson

Since we’re specifically interested in noun groups this lesson, you’ll see us treat prepositional phrases in different ways:

  • We might look closely at a noun group inside a prepositional phrase.
  • Or we might look at a noun group that contains a  prepositional phrase.

It will depend on what we’re trying to draw attention to at each point.

For more background info

Want to know more about prepositional phrases and get to understand them better? Check out the Prepositional phrases lesson.

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