Nominalizations

Check out all those nouns that end in

--ance (tolerance, avoidance, importance, cognizance);

--ence (competence, coherence);

--ment (agreement, acknowledgement, assignment, accomplishment);

--tion (rejection, reflection, calculation, formulation, fornication, hospitalization);

--sion (admission, decision, secession, remission, emission, transmission);

--ity (conformity, deformity, capability, respectability);

--ness (happiness, homeliness, resourcefulness, blessedness);

--ing (the awarding, the recognizing, the discovering, his thinking);

If you find yourself using a lot of these sorts of words, you may be getting stuffy. Try recasting those nouns as verbs or modifiers and see what happens:

John made a decision -->John decided . . .
Betsy made a calculation -->Betsy calculated . . .
Happiness is what she wanted -->She wanted to be happy.

Look for nominalizations in prepositional phrases. (Prepositions often glue themselves to nouns.)

. . . in acceptance of . . .
. . . in avoidance of . . .
. . . in the knowledge of . . .
. . . in response to . . .
. . . after consideration . . .
. . . with this characterization
. . . under this obligation . . .
. . . for fulfillment . . .
. . . of intelligence . . .
. . . of interest . . .
. . . of responsibility . . .
. . . for implementation . . .
. . . under consideration . . .
. . . with the exploitation . . .

Anyone can learn to change "conformity" to "conform" or "elimination" to "eliminate." The problem may, in fact, be one of taste or preference: many people--including many teachers--like heavily nominalized prose. Certainly many students--particularly good ones--have often been rewarded for writing heavily nominalized prose.

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