Get Rid of Nominalizations

Writing Across the Disciplines Clarifying Sentences: a Few Tips

Get rid of nominalizations and be suspicious of Latin and Greek:

1. We conducted an investigation of the matter.

2. There should be no hesitation in regard to saying no.

3. King’s utilization of examples is effective.

Watch out for noun stacks:

1. There is a growing awareness of organizational employee creative capacity.

2. Position acquisition requirements are any combination of high school graduation and years of increasingly responsible secretarial experience.

3. Cerebral-anoxia-associated neonatal period birth injuries can lead to epileptic convulsions.

Use active agents as subjects (people do nicely), and place subjects close to the beginning of the sentence:

1. This will be a symposium in which interdepartmental work on the social construction of representation will be foregrounded.

2. The intention has been to create new procedures whereby this hypothesis can be tested.

Clear clutter at the beginning of sentence and elsewhere:

1. It is clear that writers who have problems with the organization of their ideas at the sentence level will tend to produce sentences that take longer to get to the point and are more wordy in style.

Watch out for wordiness, in the form of empty phrases:

1. For all intents and purposes, the reason Mr. Henderson arrived late for work was due to the fact that he stopped at very many traffic lights that were red in color.

2. Pursuant to the requirements of what is often referred to as “common sense,” a protective overhead waterproof shielding device will be deployed, in view of the fact that precipitation is being experienced at this point in time. Watch out for wordiness again: KILL “there are. . . that” and “it is. . . that” and their variants:

1. There are many students who like reading.

2. It is the desk that is uncomfortable.

3. It is frequently thought that Hamlet is Shakespeare’s most puzzling play.

4. From field observations, it was shown that virtually all tagged individuals remained in their original home ranges.

Employ parallelism of various kinds, and listen for it in your prose:

1. Shakespeare wrote comedies, tragedies, romances, and the plays based on historical figures.

2. Jane Eyre wants financial independence and to find love.

3. Vasu not only broke Indian traditions, but also was destroying Nataraj’s life.

4. In The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, we empathize with Billy the Kid, more than Pat Garrett.

5. Andrew believes that Jerry Bines is innocent, and Vera’s book does not characterize Jerry properly.

Combine choppy sentences: coordinate ideas to which you want to give equal emphasis; subordinate ideas to which you do not.

1. The Book of Ruth was probably written in the fifth century B.C. It was a time when women were considered the property of men.

2. Medical researchers have long been seeking a cure for a disease. The disease takes thousands of lives every year.

3. The image of the clock is the first image of the film. It fills the screen. The time clock is also prominent. It is another version of a clock. The workers’ time is carefully recorded. The speed of the assembly line is related to the time of the day. Everything stops when the factory whistle blows.

4. John Isidore is known as a special, and he is the most empathic character in the novel.

5. The Little Tramp tries to tighten all the bolts, and ends up being swallowed by the machine.