Awkward, cumbersome noun phrases are probably the biggest culprit in academese creep. The English language is remarkable for its versatility—nouns can become verbs, verbs can become nouns and adjectives, adjectives can become nouns, verbs, adverbs—all by adding different endings to the root word. This versatility gives ESL writers many opportunities to misuse words. However, the bigger problem of over-nominalization involves most academic writers, especially those in the social sciences and some of the humanities. Here are some examples that Steven Pinker includes in Sense of Style. He underlined the verbs made into nouns (nominalization). I included his rewrites in italics.
Prevention of neurogenesis diminished social avoidance.
When we prevented neurogenesis, the mice no longer avoided other mice.
Comprehension checks were used as exclusion criteria.
We excluded people who failed to understand the instructions.
It may be that some missing genes are more contributive to the spatial deficit.
Perhaps some missing genes contribute to the spatial deficit. (p.50)
Notice that the rewrites not only use verbs, they use active verbs, not passive, dead ones. The researchers and the elements being researched become active agents rather than lifeless, passive receivers of action. The writer engages readers with clear, active-voice phrasing. Test this yourself. Read just the first example above. I’m sure you had to think a bit about what this sentence means. Now read the rewrite. Clear and easy to grasp its meaning. All examples here clearly show this difference.
One way, then, to avoid over-nominalization is to write in active voice using personal pronouns where necessary to engage readers. The difficulty for beginning academic writers is that their junior status in the academy pressures them to demonstrate nimble versatility with the language, thus the creation of long noun phrases that are meant to “impress” their peers and overseers. It’s also a sure way for writers to create awkward, hard to read sentences; it’s never easier to write in abstract, passive-voice academese. The struggle to do so infiltrates the style and affects readability.
However, nominalization has a way of sneaking in during revision. I suppose the impulse is to make the writing more “sophisticated,” when it usually makes the reading denser and more difficult. In Sense of Style, Pinker highlights a prime example of such bad writing:
The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power. (p.36)
How sophisticated! All those big nouns! But after reading this I imagine even most Marxists would just sigh and say, “Huh?” The passage is filled with passive voice (in italics), and nominalizations of verbs (underlined). Some wordy verb phrases (boldface) litter this passage too. “Marked a shift” could become “shifted,” “brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure” could become “questioned how time affects structure.” The writer here is on a quest to obfuscate rather than clarify, to impress with passive voice and verb and noun phrasing. Really, it confuses and disengages readers. Editors know that when they have to read a sentence over again slowly to gain its meaning, the sentence needs revision. Writers should use this same test when they revise.
The other problem with this sentence is its length—94 words! Few mortals can write well enough to pull this off. I’ve read beautiful page-length sentences from Henry Miller and F. Scott Fitzgerald, but I’ve never encountered an academic writer who could. So don’t!
Getting back to Einstein’s suggestion to write clearly and simply belies another common problem facing beginning academic writers, especially ESL writers—lack of confidence in your writing ability, which may or may not be because of a lack of a clear understanding of your arguments. I’ve found that most doctoral students understand their argument well enough but aren’t confident in explaining it. So they write a sentence, an idea. Then, feeling that they did not capture all of the idea, they essentially repeat what they just wrote, adding a bit more to include an aspect they didn’t get into the first sentence. Redundancy. The slogan I give my writing students is Every Sentence Says Something New. Of course, it should be coherently related and linked to the previous sentence to provide flow. But it’s a new idea. Here’s where I often see academese creep. Instead of repeating the phrasing in the first sentence, noun and verb phrases in the second sentence attempt to fill the holes. But it’s still redundant, only now denser and less interesting because it’s not adding any new ideas.
And for ESL writers, this is a trap because using effective noun and verb phrasing is difficult. Chinese writers sometimes translate their grouped ideograms to produce incomprehensible, awkward phrases in an attempt to communicate their idea more fully thinking their first attempt did not. Any survey of T-shirts created in Japan, China, and Korea with messages in English demonstrate the difficulty of translating from these native languages to English. Basic English syntax and correct word choice is hard enough without trying to create long phrases. So to these writers I advise caution in using noun and verb phrases three or more words long. Phrases like “information storage device applications” or “management team protocol structure” are difficult for readers to process. Break them up with into shorter noun phrases connected by prepositions, such as “applications that store information on devices” or “a protocol structure for management teams.”