Nominalization: Turning Verbs and Clauses into Nouns

Level C2 · Advanced Structures

Nominalization is the process of turning a verb, adjective, or whole clause into a noun or noun phrase — a hallmark of formal, academic, and journalistic written English. By replacing an action with the name of that action, nominalization removes the human doer from the front of the sentence and shifts the focus onto the abstract process or result instead, producing writing that sounds more compact, objective, and impersonal: They decided to postpone the meeting becomes Their decision to postpone the meeting (was announced), where decision, not they, is now the head of the phrase.

Nominalization works in several related ways:

• Verb → noun via a suffix: this reuses the same suffixes that form abstract nouns (-tion, -ment, -ure, -al...) but applies them to rewrite a whole clause, not just to build a single word — decide → decision (They decided to postpone the meeting → Their decision to postpone the meeting), fail → failure (The company failed to meet its targets → The company's failure to meet its targets).
• A finite clause with that can become a noun phrase, losing its finite verb entirely: Because the government reduced taxes, growth increased → The government's reduction of taxes led to increased growth — reduced becomes reduction, and its object taxes is reattached with of.
• The nominalized form is often made the grammatical subject, so the sentence foregrounds the outcome or process rather than the person doing it — the more direct We must reduce costs urgently becomes the more formal, impersonal Urgent cost reduction is necessary.
• Formal writing often chains several nominalizations in a row, producing a dense nominal style: The implementation of the new policy resulted in a significant improvement in efficiency. Everyday spoken English prefers a more direct verbal style built around real verbs and people: They implemented the new policy and efficiency improved a lot — the two describe the same event, but the choice between them is a matter of register, not correctness.

The most common mistake is nominalizing indiscriminately, stacking one abstract noun on top of another until the sentence loses its actual actors and actions — The implementation of the improvement of the efficiency of the reduction of costs... is exactly the kind of dense, hard-to-read chain that gives academic writing a bad name; good formal style nominalizes selectively, not exhaustively. A second frequent error is dropping the preposition that reconnects the nominalized noun to its original object — the reduction taxes is wrong; the noun needs of to link it back to what was reduced: the reduction of taxes.

Look for an abstract noun ending in a typical nominalizing suffix (-tion, -sion, -ment, -ance/-ence, -al, -ure) standing where a verb's action would otherwise be — especially when it is the grammatical subject of the sentence, often followed by of + the original object. This is the signature of formal, written, academic-register English, in contrast to the more direct, personal, verb-led style typical of everyday speech.

Practice

Nominalization: Verb to Noun · Nominalization: Clauses into Noun Phrases