Beware of Zombie Nouns In a letter he wrote to a friend in 1880,
Mark Twain said, “I notice that you use plain, simple language,
short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write
English — It is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it;
don’t let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. When you
catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don’t mean utterly, but kill
most of them — then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when
they are close together. They give strength when they are wide
apart. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit,
once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any
other vice. “ Helen Sword is on the same track as Twain, but
adjectives aren’t her pet peeve. She’s on a crusade to stamp out
“nominalizations,” or what she calls zombie nouns. Zombie nouns
transform simple and straightforward prose into verbose and
often confusing writing. Here, Sword, who teaches at the
University of Auckland in New Zealand, explains.