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).»
In that post, Helen Sword, a professor at the University of Auckland, also called for
eliminating nominalizations, which she affectionately labels Zombie Nouns:
Except for passive voice, the use
of nominalizations (a / k / a buried verbs) is perhaps the best sign of poor legal writing.
At their best,
nominalizations help us express complex ideas: perception, intelligence, epistemology.
A paragraph heavily populated
by nominalizations will send your readers straight to sleep.
They can start by targeting two main enemies of efficient legal writing: buried verbs (
aka nominalizations) and unnecessary prepositions.
Both results, though, were skewed toward the «Flabby» end of the scale because I needed to use the
word nominalization multiple times in the samples because of the purpose of the post.
WordRake 3 converts hundreds of
dull nominalizations to lively verbs («make a recommendation» becomes «recommend»), turns negative statements into positive statements («the auditor didn't find any discrepancies» becomes «the auditor found no discrepancies»), and removes windy «windups» («It should be stated that» and «Please note that»).
The heavy reliance
on nominalizations and the verb «to be» sucks all the action from the story.
It will cross-out words, edit things you don't need or dull words, it will help you get rid of something that we
call nominalizations, most lawyers have never even heard that word, but that's part of what makes our writing so dull sometimes is writing with nouns that could be verbs or WordRake will recognize a lot of those and brighten your writing, get rid of the clutter around them.
Below, I discuss
what nominalizations and buried verbs are, and how to eliminate them from your legal writing.
Here are 30
nominalizations taken from Garner's Legal Writing in Plain English, Garner on Language and Writing, and Garner's Advanced Legal Writing & Editing seminar textbook, and the action verbs you should replace them with:
In the third sentence, the active voice you can not store any items in your parking space is substituted for the passive voice /
nominalization phrase the garage is not intended for storage of any items.
avoid nominalizations, turning a verb into a noun, use the word conclude rather than they draw conclusions;
Nominalizations and buried verbs are a huge problem in legal writing.
Avoiding
nominalizations are one way you can allow the reader to quickly digest your story.
Nominalizations are a tried and true way to make one sound smart.
Avoid
nominalizations, which are nouns formed from other parts of speech, i.e., where form becomes «formation;» «indicate» becomes «indication,» and «object» becomes «objection.
Let's remove
the nominalizations, wordy phrases, and passive voice:
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?).
Striking
the nominalization in accordance with, and changing the passive voice smoking is prohibited to active voice, we get: «The Minnesota Clean Air Act prohibits smoking.»