How Nominalisation Turns Actions Into Abstract Ideas—and Can Hide Agency

Compare:

The committee decided to delay the launch.
The committee’s decision delayed the launch.
The delay resulted from a decision by the committee.

The event is related, but the grammar has changed what the sentence treats as a thing.

Nominalisation turns actions, processes or qualities into nouns so they can be discussed as abstract objects.

Quick Read

Words such as decide → decision, analyse → analysis, fail → failure and effective → effectiveness let writers package complex processes into noun phrases. This can create formal, compact writing. It can also bury actors, weaken verbs and make responsibility harder to see.

Action → noun → abstraction → compression → possible loss of agency.

One-Sentence Answer

Nominalisation is useful when students need to reason about ideas as concepts, but weak when it turns clear actions into dense nouns that hide who did what.

The Developmental Route

Stage	Nominalisation control is becoming
Lower Primary	Recognising common noun forms such as choice, movement and agreement
Middle Primary	Turning simple actions and qualities into nouns where useful
Upper Primary	Using abstract nouns to connect ideas across sentences
Secondary	Balancing abstraction with clear agency, active verbs, causation and readable academic style

Nominalisation Makes Ideas Portable

Once an action becomes a noun, a writer can refer to it repeatedly as a concept.

The government expanded the programme. This expansion increased access.

The noun expansion packages the previous action and allows the next sentence to reason about it.

This can support cohesion across a paragraph.

See How Cohesion Holds Sentences and Paragraphs Together.

Nominalisation Helps Build Academic Abstraction

Formal writing often discusses processes as concepts:

migration;
development;
regulation;
comparison;
evaluation;
interpretation.

These nouns allow writers to compare, classify and evaluate complex processes without restating every action in full.

But Abstraction Has a Cost

Consider:

The implementation of the revised assessment procedures resulted in a reduction in student participation.

The sentence contains several abstract nouns: implementation, assessment, reduction, participation.

A clearer version may be:

After the school introduced the revised assessment procedures, fewer students participated.

The second version restores actors and verbs.

Nominalisation Can Hide Who Acted

A decision was made to close the service.

Who decided?

The noun decision, combined with passive voice, allows the actor to disappear.

Compare:

The board decided to close the service.

The second version makes responsibility visible.

Nominalisation Can Hide Causation

The decline in attendance followed the introduction of the new rule.

The sentence places two abstract events beside each other without establishing whether one caused the other.

A reader should resist turning sequence into causation simply because the nouns sound formal.

See How Students Track Cause and Effect Across a Text.

Abstract Nouns Can Hide Criteria

Words such as success, effectiveness, fairness and improvement appear precise because they are nouns.

But each may require a definition.

The programme’s effectiveness increased.

Effectiveness measured how?

Nominalisation Can Strengthen Paragraph Structure

Used well, nominalisation turns a whole earlier idea into the starting point of the next sentence.

Students began submitting work earlier after reminders were introduced. This improvement reduced last-minute errors.

The noun phrase connects the sentences efficiently.

Nominalisation Can Make Writing Sound Formal Without Making It Better

Students sometimes believe formal English requires longer nouns and fewer direct verbs.

This can create sentences such as:

The implementation of improvement measures facilitated the achievement of enhanced performance.

The sentence sounds formal but communicates very little.

A clearer version might be:

The school introduced targeted changes, and student performance improved.

Good Formal Writing Still Needs Strong Verbs

Formal register is not created by eliminating verbs.

Direct verbs can make academic writing clearer:

The study shows…
The evidence suggests…
The policy restricts…
The data indicate…

See How Register Changes English for Audience, Purpose and Relationship.

Nominalisation and Reporting

Compare:

The researcher argued that the sample was too small.
The researcher’s argument concerned the small sample size.

The first foregrounds an act of arguing. The second turns the argument into an object that can be examined as a concept.

Neither is automatically better. The writer chooses according to what the next sentence needs to do.

Nominalisation and Responsibility

A sentence such as “There was a failure to follow procedure” can make responsibility less visible than “The team failed to follow procedure”.

Students should ask whether this distance is appropriate or whether it protects the actor from scrutiny.

A Worked Example

Dense version:

The introduction of stricter submission requirements led to an increase in compliance and a reduction in late work.

Questions:

Who introduced the requirements?
Who complied?
Does the evidence establish causation or only sequence?
What counts as compliance?

Clearer version if agency matters:

After teachers introduced stricter submission requirements, more students submitted work on time.

The rewrite is not automatically superior in every context. It simply makes the actors and outcome easier to inspect.

Nominalisation in Comprehension

When a sentence feels unusually dense, students can convert abstract nouns back into verbs.

For example:

The rejection of the proposal caused frustration.

Becomes:

Someone rejected the proposal, and people became frustrated.

The rewrite exposes questions about actors and cause.

Nominalisation in Argumentative Writing

Students should use abstract nouns when they help organise ideas, compare processes or maintain cohesion.

They should switch back to active verbs when the sentence becomes vague about agency or causation.

Abstract when the idea needs to become an object; verbal when the action needs to remain visible.

A Diagnostic Map

Writing sounds formal but vague: convert key nouns back into verbs.
Actor disappears: ask who performed the action.
Cause becomes unclear: separate sequence from mechanism.
Too many abstract nouns: restore concrete subjects and strong verbs.
Paragraph feels repetitive: use one well-chosen nominalisation to package an earlier idea.
Uses success/effectiveness/improvement without definition: expose the criterion.
Assumes nominalisation is always bad: identify whether abstraction is performing useful conceptual work.

How We Teach Nominalisation

We ask students to translate sentences in both directions.

verb-heavy sentence → abstract noun version;
dense nominalised sentence → actor-and-action version.

Then students decide which version better serves the purpose.

Why a 3-Pax English Class Helps

One student can defend the formal abstract version, another can restore agency, and the third can judge which communicates the intended meaning more precisely.

What Parents Can Look For

When your child’s sentence contains several words ending in -tion, -ment, -ness or -ity, ask:

Can you turn one of these nouns back into a verb and tell me who is doing it?

Frequently Asked Questions

Is nominalisation bad writing?

No. It is essential for abstract and academic writing. Problems appear when too many nominalisations make agency, causation or meaning harder to see.

Why does nominalisation sound formal?

It allows writers to package processes as concepts and build denser noun phrases, a common feature of academic and institutional language.

Why is this useful in Secondary English?

Secondary students need greater abstraction in analytical writing, but they also need to recognise when formal language obscures responsibility or causal structure.

The Larger Idea: Grammar Decides What Becomes a Thing

Nominalisation lets language turn actions into objects of thought.

That is powerful. It allows complex ideas to be carried forward and examined.

But every compression hides detail.

Strong writers know when abstraction clarifies thinking—and when the reader needs the actor and action restored.

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