Summary: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Virginia-Woolf-Dr-Julia-Briggs/dp/0156032295/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1365480193&sr=1-1&keywords=virginia+woolf+briggs"></a> Those zombie, empty nouns that don't stand for any real thing—how do they creep into our writing? Listen to the episode here: OR <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/word-shots-the-podcast/id611651233">SUBSCRIBE to Word Shots in iTunes</a> or your favorite podcatcher. Full Transcript Last week I talked about how much our writing is strengthened when we replace abstract subjects with concrete ones capable of actually performing actions, and then use those actions as our primary verbs. Next week, we’ll look at some strategies for doing that. But first, let’s talk about what those abstract nouns are called, and how they arise. This will help us understand which ones are the worst offenders. Then we’ll know how to tell which ones to leave alone. Page 1: The Dreadful Word <a class="zem_slink" title="Nominalization" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominalization" target="_blank" rel="wikipedia">Nominalization</a> Stands for a Dreadful Thing. Those abstract nouns that find their way into subject and object positions have a technical name among linguists: they’re called nominalizations. That is, they’re some word that’s normally not a noun, but been turned into one. There are three parts of speech that get nominalized: adverbs, adjectives, verbs. The nominalizations that wreak the worst havoc on writing are the verbs, so we’ll save them for last, and deal with the easy ones first. Rarest and also least troublesome are adverbs. You’ve heard me use a nominalized adverb at least once if you’ve listened to all the episodes of Word Shots. In episode 6, I said that writers often get in trouble because they’ve “never clarified the why at all.” In that sentence, I’ve nominalized the adverb why. Most uses of a nominalized adverb are like this one; the writer is asking you to take a close look at that adverb either as a word or as a concept, and so it gets treated as a noun. If the writer’s dealing with it as a concept, there may be no way to make it less abstract than it is. But notice that I used it as object, not as subject. The subject is the writer, the one who must deal with the concept, who must look closely at the reasons behind his or her opus, “the why”. So the sentence still has the elements of story: an agent, the writer; and an action, in this case an action not taken, that of defining why he or she is writing. If, in your reading, you give up on an author when you find such a usage, it’s probably because you disagree with their entire premise; you don’t believe that the adverb-as-subject is worth studying. Your reason for quitting is less likely to be that this way of using the adverb is unclear or distasteful to you. Adjectives are nominalized more often than adverbs. They can be a little more troublesome, but not too much so. A nominalized adjective names a state or condition, and we’re actually quite used to thinking about those. For example, we often think about conditions such as happiness or sadness. These are nominalized forms of the adjectives happy and sad. The reason they’re not distressingly abstract is that we usually don’t think of them as separate from some actual being. Instead, we normally picture a happy or sad person, or perhaps an animal. And usually, the writer who uses one of these abstractions gives us some context that helps us choose the right thing to visualize. Last week I used the sample sentence “Sadness claimed Virginia Woolf.” That’s an extreme case of the writer supplying plenty of context. Although the nominalized adjective sadness was in the subject position, the rest of the sentence invited the reader not only to picture it as belonging to a person, but to a very specific person. On the website, I included a picture of Woolf, who even when young and well-featured,
