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Wednesday, June 2, 2010

If you're curious about nominalization...

Nick Daws has a great blog post on nominalization and why you might like to avoid it to keep your prose more vibrant and active. It's an easy pattern to fall into unconsciously, and thus a post worth reading. The post is here.

5 comments:

  1. I'm highly amused that 'nomilization' is an abstract noun formed from a verb. Nick makes a good point!

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  2. You're welcome. I thought it was useful, because I see it in a lot of places in writing. And yes, K, it is amusing that "nominalization" is one of those nouns he's telling us to avoid!

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  3. So, in other words, I was over-complicating things. Okay.

    My initial story sentences tend to be subject+verb constructions. Too many back to back and I get bored reading my own writing, so I throw in additional clauses and descriptors to vary the cadence. I just have to watch out for over-using those -tion words when I can write a tighter, clearer sentence. The middle ground is hard to define sometimes. I'm not sure I totally get it yet of when the use would be considered a good effect, but I'll keep it in mind when I start making revisions. (I have a tendency to over-analyze when I should be just getting words down at all.)

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  4. Jaleh,
    Repetitive grammatical structure becomes irritating quickly - I talked about it in my Parallelism post - essentially, reducing a narrative to a list. The problem arises when actions by a protagonist, critical to the drive of the story, get put in terms of the objects affected rather than the subject/protagonist acting.

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  5. Sheesh. I should have said, "The problem with *nominalization* arises when actions by a protagonist... [etc.]"

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