{"id":940,"date":"2019-12-31T17:40:34","date_gmt":"2020-01-01T01:40:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/?p=940"},"modified":"2020-12-31T16:11:03","modified_gmt":"2021-01-01T00:11:03","slug":"writing-for-developers-nominalizations-and-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/2019\/12\/writing-for-developers-nominalizations-and-you.html","title":{"rendered":"Writing for Developers: Nominalizations and You"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>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&#8217;t had a lot of formal training in writing, or English isn&#8217;t our native language &#8212; or both. We&#8217;re supposed to &#8220;write clearly,&#8221; but nobody ever explains <em>how<\/em> exactly to do that.<\/p>\n<p>So I thought I would share one of my favorite low-level writing techniques. It&#8217;s widely applicable, and it&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<h2>What is a Nominalization?<\/h2>\n<p>A nominalization is an abstract noun derived from a verb or adjective. For example:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><em>initialize<\/em>, the verb, becomes <em>initialization<\/em>, the abstract noun<\/li>\n<li><em>minify<\/em>, the verb, becomes <em>minification<\/em>, the abstract noun<\/li>\n<li><em>elegant<\/em>, the adjective, becomes <em>elegance<\/em>, the abstract noun<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Side note: some nominalizations have the same form whether they&#8217;re an abstract noun or a verb. English is weird like that.<\/p>\n<p>Aside from the occasional edge case (beyond the scope of this post), it&#8217;s usually an easy win to scan your draft for nominalizations and replace your abstract nouns with verbs and adjectives. Let&#8217;s see how this works in practice.<\/p>\n<h2>Example of Eliminating Nominalizations<\/h2>\n<p>Here&#8217;s an example of a very bad sentence (written by me, on purpose):<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The Security Council&#8217;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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>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\u2019s saying.<\/p>\n<p>How do we fix this mess? Let&#8217;s start by flagging the abstract nouns:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The Security Council&#8217;s <strong>proposal<\/strong> would provide for individual engineering team <strong>certification<\/strong> of the <strong>resilience<\/strong> of any new applications that were requested for <strong>exemption<\/strong> from core network security guidelines.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The equivalent concrete verbs and adjectives are:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>proposal (noun) \/ propose (verb)<\/li>\n<li>certification (noun) \/ certify (verb)<\/li>\n<li>resilience (noun) \/ resilient (adjective)<\/li>\n<li>exemption (noun) \/ exempt (verb)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Breaking into pieces and replacing the nominalizations looks like:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>&#8220;The Security Council&#8217;s proposal&#8221; can become &#8220;The Security Council proposes&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;team certification of&#8221; can become &#8220;team certifies&#8221; or &#8220;team must certify&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;resilience of any new applications&#8221; can become &#8220;new applications are resilient&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;requested for exemption&#8221; can become &#8220;request [them\/us\/the council] to exempt&#8221; or even &#8220;ask [&#8230;] to exempt&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Stitching the pieces back together:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The Security Council <strong>proposes<\/strong> that when individual engineering teams <strong>ask<\/strong> us to <strong>exempt<\/strong> new applications from core network security guidelines, the team must <strong>certify<\/strong> that the application is <strong>resilient<\/strong>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This new sentence isn&#8217;t necessarily great, but we&#8217;ve at least managed to unscramble it. This is in spite of the fact that we haven&#8217;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&#8217;ve done so far is convert four nominalizations (and if we&#8217;re being scrupulously honest, we&#8217;ve added a fifth verb, &#8220;ask&#8221;).<\/p>\n<p>So why is the sentence easier to read? It&#8217;s because converting abstract nouns to verbs and adjectives has <em>forced us to clarify who is doing what<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>More generally, &#8220;clarifying who is doing what&#8221; is one of the more powerful tools you have available for improving your prose. This is often what readers actually mean when they complain, &#8220;This is unclear.&#8221; When a reader says this, a probable root cause is that the sentence hasn&#8217;t properly identified its <em>characters<\/em> and their <em>actions<\/em>. In the next post, I&#8217;ll <a href=\"\/Journal\/2020\/12\/writing-for-developers-characters-and-action.html\">dive into this in more detail<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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&#8217;t had a lot of formal training in writing, or English isn&#8217;t our native language &#8212; or both. We&#8217;re supposed to &#8220;write clearly,&#8221; but nobody ever [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,12,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-940","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-howto","category-technical-writing","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/940","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=940"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/940\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":975,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/940\/revisions\/975"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=940"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=940"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=940"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}