Transcript
You know verbs. Doing words. Words like improve, believe, or create. Verbs are powerful, and the best sentences use verbs to express key actions.
Nice and clear, right? But it’s actually possible to turn a lot of verbs into nouns. You know nouns. Thing words, like chair, dog, or donut.
Except nouns made from verbs are different. Nouns made from verbs are abstract nouns. They’re ideas, concepts, we can’t see them or touch them. They’re, well, abstract.
Let’s look at that sentence again. The trouble is, far too often when people write, they replace powerful verbs with these abstract noun versions of the same word. And those nouns are waffle magnets. They need extra words to make them work.
The sentence becomes heavy, indirect, and harder to read. So as much as possible, keep your doing words doing. And if you do, it will help to keep your readers reading.
There are some words that can just drag your writing down. They’re heavy and dull, and they have a nasty habit of lugging even more weight in with them. They make the person reading your writing work way too hard to understand your meaning. And, the fact is, they might not even bother.
The good news is that once you get used to recognising such words, you will be able to change them and quickly make your writing more clear, concise and direct.
The doing word behind the thing
What we’re talking about are nouns (things) that are sneakily hiding verbs (doing or being words, actions). For example, the noun ‘discussion’ hides the verb ‘(to) discuss’. You can recognise a noun by the fact you put ‘the’, ‘a’ or ‘an’ in front of it (‘a discussion’, for instance).
These are called ‘nominalisations’. In fact, ‘nominalisation’ is itself a nominalisation: ‘to nominalise’ is to turn a verb or adjective into a noun. But don’t worry too much about that.
These nouns that hide verbs often end in -tion or -sion. That’s why we say you should shun the -tions. It’s not the only ending (others include -ment, -age, -al and -ence). But it’s definitely something to look out for in your writing – especially if the -tion/-sion words start to pile up.
Shun the -tions
When you spot them, try to work out what verbs are hiding behind them. Then see if you can change your sentences to use the equivalent verbs instead. (For example, change ‘We need a discussion’ to ‘We need to discuss’.) As you’ve seen, this will probably mean you can cut out other words too.
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