Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing. Draft is a
series about the art and craft of writing. Nouns formed from
other parts of speech are called nominalizations. Academics love
them; so do lawyers, bureaucrats and business writers. I call
them “zombie nouns” because they cannibalize active verbs, suck
the lifeblood from adjectives and substitute abstract entities
for human beings: The proliferation of nominalizations in a
discursive formation may be an indication of a tendency toward
pomposity and abstraction. The sentence above contains no fewer
than seven nominalizations, each formed from a verb or an
adjective. Yet it fails to tell us who is doing what. When we
eliminate or reanimate most of the zombie nouns (tendency
becomes tend, abstraction becomes abstract) and add a human
subject and some active verbs, the sentence springs back to
life: Writers who overload their sentences with nominalizations
tend to sound pompous and abstract. Only one zombie noun – the
key word nominalizations – has b