In the second sentence, To prepare to clean it is substituted
for the nominalization in preparation for our freshen - up (is freshen - up even a word?).
Professor Sword also recommended that her readers check out her website — The Writer's Diet © — which she claims can give nascent writers an «operationalized assessment of [their]... propensity
for nominalization dependence (translation: to diagnose your own zombie habits).»
Not exact matches
The CALS construct is defined as a constellation of the high - utility language skills that correspond to linguistic features prevalent in oral and written academic discourse across school content areas and that are infrequent in colloquial conversations (e.g., knowledge of logical connectives, such as nevertheless, consequently; knowledge of structures that pack dense information, such as
nominalizations or embedded clauses; knowledge of structures
for organizing argumentative texts) Over the last years, as part of the Catalyzing Comprehension Through Discussion Debate project funded by IES to the Strategic Educational Research Partnership, Dr. Paola Uccelli and her research team have produced a research - based, theoretically - grounded, and psychometrically robust instrument to measure core academic language skills (CALS - I)
for students in grades 4 - 8.
In that post, Helen Sword, a professor at the University of Auckland, also called
for eliminating
nominalizations, which she affectionately labels Zombie Nouns:
So,
for example, even if a superior repeatedly points out to the person that he should ditch the here - and - there words and other forms of legalese (as The Lawyerist's Andy Mergendahl has advised here), or that
nominalizations and buried verbs should be reworked into active voice, or that Enclosed please find (PDF) is silly and should be stricken from all correspondence, a month or two later the superior will see these legal - writing foibles in a letter, memorandum, or, worse, a brief filed with a court.
Of course, it's common
for non-lawyers to use
nominalizations and related wordy phrases.
Except
for passive voice, the use of
nominalizations (a / k / a buried verbs) is perhaps the best sign of poor legal writing.