Any engineer worth their salt knows that writing is a big part of the job. But for many of us, that can be a scary prospect. Some of us haven’t had a lot of formal training in writing, or English isn’t our native language — or both. We’re supposed to “write clearly,” but nobody ever explains how exactly to do that.

So I thought I would share one of my favorite low-level writing techniques. It’s widely applicable, and it’s doable as long as you are able to identify core parts of English (nouns, verbs, and adjectives). The technique is: find and eliminate nominalizations.

What is a Nominalization?

A nominalization is an abstract noun derived from a verb or adjective. For example:

• initialize, the verb, becomes initialization, the abstract noun
• minify, the verb, becomes minification, the abstract noun
• elegant, the adjective, becomes elegance, the abstract noun

Side note: some nominalizations have the same form whether they’re an abstract noun or a verb. English is weird like that.

Aside from the occasional edge case (beyond the scope of this post), it’s usually an easy win to scan your draft for nominalizations and replace your abstract nouns with verbs and adjectives. Let’s see how this works in practice.

Example of Eliminating Nominalizations

Here’s an example of a very bad sentence (written by me, on purpose):

The Security Council’s proposal would provide for individual engineering team certification of the resilience of any new applications that were requested for exemption from core network security guidelines.

Here I have used all my dark powers to write an unclear, but still syntactically correct English sentence. Before continuing, please re-read this sentence as many times as you need to in order to understand what it’s saying.

How do we fix this mess? Let’s start by flagging the abstract nouns:

The Security Council’s proposal would provide for individual engineering team certification of the resilience of any new applications that were requested for exemption from core network security guidelines.

The equivalent concrete verbs and adjectives are:

• proposal (noun) / propose (verb)
• certification (noun) / certify (verb)
• resilience (noun) / resilient (adjective)
• exemption (noun) / exempt (verb)

Breaking into pieces and replacing the nominalizations looks like:

• “The Security Council’s proposal” can become “The Security Council proposes”
• “team certification of” can become “team certifies” or “team must certify”
• “resilience of any new applications” can become “new applications are resilient”
• “requested for exemption” can become “request [them/us/the council] to exempt” or even “ask […] to exempt”

Stitching the pieces back together:

The Security Council proposes that when individual engineering teams ask us to exempt new applications from core network security guidelines, the team must certify that the application is resilient.

This new sentence isn’t necessarily great, but we’ve at least managed to unscramble it. This is in spite of the fact that we haven’t radically shortened the sentence or done any deep surgery. The sentence still says what it said before, with mostly similar word choices. All we’ve done so far is convert four nominalizations (and if we’re being scrupulously honest, we’ve added a fifth verb, “ask”).

So why is the sentence easier to read? It’s because converting abstract nouns to verbs and adjectives has forced us to clarify who is doing what.

More generally, “clarifying who is doing what” is one of the more powerful tools you have available for improving your prose. This is often what readers actually mean when they complain, “This is unclear.” When a reader says this, a probable root cause is that the sentence hasn’t properly identified its characters and their actions. In the next post, I’ll dive into this in more detail.