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Nominalisation

2 min
C1
CEFR C1·other

Formula

+ -ion / -ment / -ance / -ing
+ -ity / -ness / -cy
The
nominalisation

Examples

Positive
The government's decision to raise taxes caused widespread criticism.
Negative
The lack of clarity in the announcement led to confusion among staff.
Question
What is the significance of this discovery for future research?

Usage

  • •Academic essays and research papers — states findings as facts, not actions someone performed
  • •Formal reports and business writing — sounds objective and impersonal
  • •Topic sentences that pack a whole clause into one dense noun phrase for the sentence to comment on
  • •News and journalistic headlines/leads — compresses events into short abstract nouns
  • •IELTS/academic band-boosting register — signals formal, written English over spoken English

More Examples

  • Analysts predicted a decline in consumer spending.

    decline ← decline (v.) — economic report

  • The committee reached a decision after lengthy discussion.

    decision ← decide; discussion ← discuss — formal minutes

  • Researchers emphasised the importance of early intervention.

    importance ← important; intervention ← intervene — academic abstract

  • The rapid growth of the industry surprised investors.

    growth ← grow — business journalism

  • Their failure to comply resulted in a fine.

    failure ← fail — legal/formal register

  • The proposal received strong criticism from environmentalists.

    proposal ← propose; criticism ← criticise — public debate

Common Mistakes

  • ✗Nominalising every verb in a sentence, producing a dense noun-pile that's hard to parse ('The implementation of the reduction of the utilisation of...').
  • ✗Dropping the agent entirely so it's unclear who did the action ('There was an improvement' — improved by whom?).
  • ✗Using the wrong or non-existent suffix ('analyzation' instead of 'analysis'; 'discoverment' instead of 'discovery') — nominal forms are often irregular and must be learned, not derived by rule.
  • ✗Treating an uncountable nominalisation as countable ('informations', 'an equipments') or vice versa.

Tips

  • ✓Keep nominalisation for formal/academic writing — reverting to verbs ('they decided' not 'a decision was made') keeps speech and informal writing natural.
  • ✓Pair the nominalised noun with 'of + noun phrase' to restore the missing information ('the reduction of emissions' recovers what was reduced).
  • ✓Learn irregular noun forms as vocabulary items (decide→decision, prove→proof, succeed→success) rather than assuming a fixed suffix rule.

Advanced Notes

Nominalisation is the hallmark of academic and bureaucratic English: instead of 'they analysed the data', formal writing prefers 'the analysis of the data' — the action becomes a thing, which lets it function as a subject, be modified by adjectives, and sit inside longer noun phrases. This is what makes academic prose feel dense and impersonal rather than narrative: agency and time recede, and the sentence can foreground the result instead of who did what and when. Native academic writers use it deliberately but sparingly — overusing it produces the stiff, hard-to-follow 'nominal style' that style guides (and IELTS/TOEFL examiners) actually penalise, so strong writers alternate nominalised and verbal sentences rather than nominalising everything.

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Compare With

Relative Clauses (Defining)(B1)