Nominalisation

Making compressed things act in interesting ways

We've now looked at a few ways that we can turn qualities and processes into nouns:

  • Directly converting words using nominal suffixes ('communications', 'resentment', 'barbarities').
  • Summarising or abstracting a detailed process ('the democratization of cartography').
  • Using coinages or special terminology ('schema', 'Losada ratio').

But we haven't really answered the question, why nouns?

What makes nouns so special that we want to turn other words into them!?

In narratives, noun groups represent the 'people' and 'things' in the story.

When we use nominalisations, we turn processes, events, and qualities into those 'things' in the story.

This is important because:

  • Things do actions.
  • Things have actions (or processes) happen to them.

Can you see this in action (😉) in this snippet about a European plague?

What is doing what to Scandinavia?

To add to the region's misery, it is also possible that the Justinian plague pandemic that swept across Europe from 541 onwards also reached Scandinavia.

Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings(2020)

See how the Justinian plague pandemic is being treated as a thing that can reach for somewhere.

Let's try changing the action to create a new relationship.

To add to the region's misery, it is also possible that the Justinian plague pandemic that swept across Europe from 541 onwards crippled Scandinavia.

To add to the region's misery, it is also possible that the Justinian plague pandemic that swept across Europe from 541 onwards encouraged Scandinavia to invade.

Write your own version of this snippet, changing the action to create a different relationship.

Writing this snippet without nominalisation looks something like this:

It is also possible that people in Scandinavia also caught the same thing that was making everyone sick in the rest of Europe from 541 onwards, and that would have made everyone even more miserable.

It's far less evocative, because we're stuck using boring connectors like 'that' and 'and' instead of cool verbs like 'swept' and 'reached'.

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