'Strategy Implementation': Why So Much Professional Writing Sounds Like This
By Tiffany Arnold
Founder, Arnold Editorial Service
Before I dove into freelance editing full time, I worked for U.S. State Department in Kampala, Uganda. Part of my role involved serving as the chief reporting officer on matters related to climate change and global health security. So, when dozens of Ugandans died in a literal avalanche of trash after the capital city’s sole landfill failed, and when concurrent Ebola and mpox outbreaks circulated throughout the country—at a time when the Trump White House had ordered a pause on all foreign aid and was in the process of gutting USAID—my job was to produce in-depth reports for Washington stakeholders that captured what was happening on the ground. These reports, called “cables,” were official internal records that shaped foreign policy and, in the case of the outbreaks, helped secure millions of dollars in life-saving assistance.
The narrative flow in government reports gives off an entirely different energy from most other forms of writing. Years of working in news media has made me a plain language advocate. As an outsider in the federal workforce, I was jarred by the U.S. government’s suffocating usage of jargon and acronyms. It’s a slog to read through them, let alone edit and produce them.
I hadn’t thought about this period of my career for a while. But my thoughts and feelings about the editorial ecosystem of cable writing came flooding back after I read a recent Substack post from Cheryl Stephens that broadly examined the impact of a writing style widely adopted in government reports, medical journals, and technical writing. I had an “aha” moment after reading this post. If you’ve ever struggled to suss out the meaning of a government report or read a corporate press releases and wondered, what are these people trying to say, you can probably blame the overused practice of “nouning,” technically known as nominalizing.
Nominalizing is the act of converting a noun or adjective into a verb. In scientific manuscripts, you might see “an analysis was conducted on the data” instead of “we analyzed the data.”
In this post, I break down:
When nominalization strengthens your writing
When it quietly weakens it
How spot it and re-tighten your sentences
What is nominalization?
We’re all taught to use strong verbs in our writing. But as Stephens points out, there’s often a tension between “noun-oriented” writing and “verb-oriented” writing in technical nonfiction. Nominalization is an attempt to bridge that gap. It occurs when a writer converts a noun or adjective into a verb. Here are some examples:
decide → decision
analyze → analysis
react → reaction
fail → failure
effective → effectiveness
When ‘nominalized’ nouns do too much
Nominalization can be useful when you are talking about an abstract concept that is more important than the action surrounding it. I could point to a number of examples in the medical journal articles I edit, when the authors are discussing “hospitalizations” or the “effectiveness” of a medical intervention.
But when overused, nominalizations force readers to spend a lot of effort processing what the sentence is trying to say, working against the goal of most nonfiction information products. It makes sentences long and convoluted.
As an example, take this sentence, unedited and pulled from a recent medical journal article I reviewed: Recognition and understanding of the causes of severe maternal morbidity, and leading activities aimed at improving the quality of care for perinatal populations, can aid in the improvement of maternal health.
Who is doing responsible for the “recognition and understanding”—doctors, the broader community of health care professionals, change makers at public health institutions? Who’s “leading” the activities? In focusing on these abstract concepts, the authors inadvertently obfuscated important information—the actors responsible for carrying out this work.
Sometimes, writers deliberately use nominalization to hide things. Take the phrase “mistakes were made,” the meaningless mea culpa that celebrities, politicians, and corporations use in response to bad PR. Left unanswered: Who made the mistakes?
How to spot and fix nominalization
Fix nominalizations on a case-by-case basis. When you encounter it in your writing, assess whether the abstract concept mentioned matters more than the person or agent involved in producing an action. For example, nominalization is probably OK in this sentence, “The discovery of penicillin transformed medicine,” because the focus is on the discovery itself. But it doesn’t work in this sentence, “The destruction of the building occurred at midnight,” because it leaves unclear who or what destroyed the building.
Writers run the risk of draining the pulse from their manuscripts when they sacrifice strong verbs for stilted abstractions like “strategy implementation.” To help reclaim your manuscript’s natural pacing, look for words that end in:
-tion
-ment
-ance
-ence
-ity
Then ask yourself, can I turn this back into a verb? For example, “the implementation of the policy was successful” becomes “they implemented the policy successfully.”
Also, these words almost always appear in nominalized sentence constructions. Treat them as yellow flags:
make
conduct
give
perform
carry out
Stop writing like a bureaucrat. Follow the verbs.
Good editing is less about following rules than making conscious choices. Nominalization has its place, but sometimes a writer’s hyperfocus on abstractions can strip away the manuscript’s energy or, at worst, wallpaper over needed accountability. The next time your prose starts to sound like a committee memo, take a pause. Every sentence should propel the story forward. If you find yourself stalling, follow the verbs.
