Nominalisation — the process of turning verbs and adjectives into nouns — is one of the defining features of formal academic and professional writing. The decision to implement becomes the decision to implement or simply the implementation. Students failed becomes student failure. Teachers are responsible becomes teacher responsibility. Nominalisation allows complex processes and qualities to be named as things, which can then be discussed, quantified, and referred to with articles and determiners. Understanding how to nominalise — and when to do so — gives teachers a powerful tool for producing and evaluating formal written English, and helps learners recognise and produce the abstract noun vocabulary that is so central to professional communication.
Before you start — think honestly about your own teaching and experience.
Look at the examples. Answer each question before reading the explanation — this is how your students will learn too.
A: The students failed the exam. (verb: failed)
B: The students' exam failure was unexpected. (nominalisation: failure)
A: She is responsible for professional development. (adjective: responsible)
B: Her responsibility for professional development is clearly defined. (nominalisation: responsibility)
What changes when the verb or adjective becomes a noun? What effect does this have on the style and formality of the sentence?
When a verb is nominalised, the action or process is turned into a thing — it can be named, quantified, referenced with articles and determiners, and used as a subject or object. The decision (not we decided) becomes the subject of a new sentence — the agent (we) is removed or backgrounded, and the process itself is foregrounded. This is characteristic of formal, impersonal academic and professional writing, where the writer wants to focus on processes, results, and states rather than on the people performing them. Nominalisation also allows information to be packaged more economically: instead of saying We decided to implement the new timetable and this decision was controversial, the writer can say The controversial decision to implement the new timetable... using the nominalisation as the head of a complex noun phrase. The trade-off is that nominalisation can make writing denser and harder to read if overused — the goal is appropriate, not maximum, nominalisation.
Can you see patterns in which suffix goes with which type of verb or adjective?
The most productive nominalisation suffix in English academic vocabulary is -tion/-sion, which derives from Latin-origin verbs: educate/education, implement/implementation, analyse/analysis, demonstrate/demonstration. The suffix -ment is the most common suffix for Germanic-origin verbs: develop/development, achieve/achievement, assess/assessment. Adjectives ending in -ive take -ity or -eness: creative/creativity or creativeness (though creativity is preferred), effective/effectiveness. Adjectives ending in -ful or -less take -ness: careful/carefulness, careless/carelessness. Adjectives ending in -ble take -ility (after consonant): responsible/responsibility, capable/capability. The key practical challenge is that the suffix cannot always be predicted — assess takes -ment (assessment) while analyse takes -sis (analysis, from Greek). Learners who try to apply a suffix without checking will produce errors like assessation, analyment. Building vocabulary through explicit attention to base form and all its derivational family (verb, noun, adjective, adverb) is more reliable than trying to derive forms from rules alone.
B1: The teacher assessed the students' progress carefully. (clear, direct)
B2: The careful assessment of student progress by the teacher was conducted using a range of instruments. (nominalisation — passive, agent backgrounded — appropriate for a research report)
C1: The utilisation of a wide range of methodological approaches to the facilitation of the educational process... (over-nominalised — almost incomprehensible)
C2: Using a range of methods to support learning... (much clearer)
Nominalisation is appropriate when: (1) the focus is on a process or result rather than the person who performed it (assessment of progress, not the teacher assessed); (2) the nominalisation allows efficient reference back to a previously mentioned event (this decision, the implementation); (3) the context is formal academic or professional writing where personal subjects are backgrounded. Nominalisation is inappropriate when: (1) it produces unnecessarily dense or abstract language that obscures meaning; (2) verbs would be clearer and more direct; (3) it removes important information about who performed the action. Over-nominalisation — sometimes called zombie nouns because abstract nouns drain the life from verbs — is a recognised problem in academic and bureaucratic writing. The goal is to use nominalisation purposefully rather than reflexively. A good test: if removing the nominalisation and using a verb instead makes the sentence clearer without losing formality, the verb is better.'
| Form | Use / Meaning | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Suffix | Source | Examples |
| -tion / -sion | Latin-origin verbs (most productive in academic vocabulary) | educate → education / implement → implementation / decide → decision / analyse → analysis |
| -ment | Mainly Germanic-origin verbs | develop → development / assess → assessment / achieve → achievement / improve → improvement |
| -ance / -ence | Verbs and adjectives | perform → performance / differ → difference / resist → resistance / correspond → correspondence |
| -ity / -ty | Adjectives (often ending in -ive, -al, -ble) | responsible → responsibility / creative → creativity / equal → equality / capable → capability |
| -ness | Adjectives (especially -ful, -less, -ive, -ward) | aware → awareness / effective → effectiveness / weak → weakness / kind → kindness |
| -al | Verbs (arrival, proposal pattern) | arrive → arrival / propose → proposal / approve → approval / survive → survival |
| -ure | Verbs (pressure, failure pattern) | fail → failure / depart → departure / expose → exposure / proceed → procedure |
NOMINALISATIONS AND COUNTABILITY
Many nominalisations are uncountable when they refer to a general process or quality, and countable when they refer to a specific instance. Assessment (general process — uncountable): Assessment is an important part of teaching. An assessment (a specific test — countable): She conducted three assessments last term. Development (general process — uncountable): Professional development is essential. A development (a specific new event — countable): This is an exciting development. Teachers should be aware that nominalising a verb does not always produce an uncountable noun — both countable and uncountable uses are common and context determines which is appropriate.
GERUNDS VS NOMINALISATIONS
Gerunds (verb + -ing used as nouns) are different from nominalisations, though both are nouns derived from verbs. Teaching is important (teaching = gerund — the process of the verb). Teacher education is important (education = nominalisation — a derived noun with its own grammar). Gerunds retain more of the feel of a verb process; nominalisations feel more like objects or entities. Both are common in formal writing. The key grammatical difference: gerunds cannot take articles in the same way (not the teaching in general senses); nominalisations often do (the education of teachers, a decision).
NOMINALISATION IN DIFFERENT PROFESSIONAL CONTEXTS
Nominalisation density varies by genre. Academic papers are heavily nominalised. Lesson plans and teaching materials use fewer nominalisations and more direct verbs. School reports use nominalisation moderately — describing student qualities and progress in formal but readable language. Policy documents are often highly nominalised. Teachers reading across these genres benefit from recognising nominalisation as a register marker — more nominalisations = more formal/academic register.
NOMINALISATION CHECK - Is the sentence expressing an action or quality that could be named as a thing? → Consider nominalisation. - Is the agent less important than the process? → Nominalisation allows agent to be backgrounded. - Does the nominalised form exist? → Check: implement → implementation (yes); assess → assessment (yes, not assessation); analyse → analysis (yes, not analyment). - Is the writing too heavy? → Count nouns vs verbs. If nouns far outnumber active verbs, consider replacing some nominalisations with clearer verbal expressions. - Countable or uncountable? → Context: general process/quality = uncountable; specific instance = countable.
Write the correct nominalised form of the word in brackets.
Each sentence has a nominalisation error. Write the correct sentence and explain the mistake.
Use this sequence directly in class — guided discovery, no textbook needed. Tap each step to mark it done.
STEP 1 — WHAT IS NOMINALISATION? (6 minutes): Write on the board: We decided to implement the new policy. / The decision to implement the new policy... Ask: what has happened to decided? Confirm: the verb decided has become the noun decision. The person (we) has disappeared. The action has become a thing. Establish: nominalisation = turning a verb or adjective into a noun. Ask: why might this be useful in formal writing?
STEP 2 — SUFFIX PATTERNS (8 minutes): Write the main suffixes on the board with two examples each: -tion (education, implementation), -ment (development, assessment), -ance/-ence (performance, difference), -ity (responsibility, creativity), -ness (awareness, effectiveness), -al (proposal, arrival), -ure (failure, departure). For each suffix, ask learners to add one more example from their own vocabulary. Confirm or correct.
STEP 3 — IRREGULAR AND UNPREDICTABLE FORMS (7 minutes): Write ten verbs and ask learners to produce the nominalisation: assess, analyse, achieve, implement, develop, decide, educate, perform, fail, resist. Confirm: assessment, analysis, achievement, implementation, development, decision, education, performance, failure, resistance. Address any non-standard forms produced (assessation, decidement, etc.). Establish: learn each nominalisation as a vocabulary item — the suffix cannot always be predicted.
STEP 4 — WHEN TO NOMINALISE AND WHEN NOT TO (10 minutes): Give learners three pairs of sentences — one verbal, one nominalised. For each pair, ask: which is more appropriate for a formal report? Which is clearer? Is the nominalised version appropriately formal or unnecessarily dense? Introduce the over-nominalisation test: count nouns vs verbs; if nouns far outnumber verbs and the verbs are mainly be/have/make, the sentence may be over-nominalised.
STEP 5 — PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE (9 minutes): Ask learners to take three sentences from their own recent writing (a lesson plan, a report comment, an email) and produce a more formally nominalised version. Then reverse: take three sentences from a formal policy document and convert them to clearer verbal expression. Compare both — when does nominalisation improve and when does it obscure?
Use directly in class — copy, adapt, or read aloud. No printing needed.
For each strategy, choose the option that best describes where you are now.
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