Compare:
The population grew rapidly.
Rapid population growth created pressure on housing.
The first sentence contains the verb grew. The second turns the process into the noun growth.
Now compare:
The committee decided to revise the policy.
The committee’s decision led to a policy revision.
The actions decide and revise have become decision and revision.
This process is called nominalisation.
Nominalisation is useful when treating an action or quality as a concept improves the reader’s model.
Start with the transformation
grow → growth
decide → decision
analyse → analysis
stable → stability
wide → width
The form changes. More importantly, the grammatical possibilities change.
A verb naturally builds a clause around an event. A noun can package that event as a thing-like concept.
Compare event language with concept language
The city expanded rapidly.
The city’s rapid expansion changed land use.
The first foregrounds what happened. The second turns expansion into a concept that can be modified, measured, compared and referred to later.
Nominalisation is common in formal style
Cambridge Grammar shows how clauses such as trade grew can become there was a growth in trade, and how the company closed the factory can become the closure of the factory.
Formal does not automatically mean better. The real question is what the noun phrase is doing.
Nominalisation can create cohesion
The government expanded the transport network. This expansion reduced average journey times.
The verb expanded becomes the noun expansion.
This creates a lexical bridge:
expanded → expansion
The second sentence can refer back to the first process without repeating the whole clause.
Nominalisation can turn a whole previous clause into a noun phrase
The river overflowed after heavy rain. This flooding damaged several roads.
The first sentence gives an event. The second packages it as flooding.
Academic writing often uses this route:
event → nominalised concept → further analysis
Nominalisation can increase abstraction
People moved from rural areas to the city.
Rural-to-urban migration increased.
The noun migration compresses many individual movements into one conceptual process.
That makes it easier to discuss rate, cause, pattern and consequence.
Science relies heavily on nominalisation
Recent 2025 research on scientific discourse shows nominalisation across engineering, biology, medicine, chemistry, geography, physics, business and information technology.
evaporate → evaporation
react → reaction
oxidise → oxidation
regulate → regulation
stable → stability
These nouns become part of disciplinary vocabulary.
Nominalisation creates technical vocabulary
React becomes reaction, then enters a larger noun phrase such as reaction rate.
This connects morphology, nominalisation, compound nouns and academic vocabulary.
Nominalisation can make comparison easier
The first sample expanded more quickly than the second sample expanded.
The first sample showed faster expansion than the second.
The process becomes a comparable property.
Nominalisation can make cause–effect writing denser
When rainfall decreased, crops failed, and food prices increased.
The decrease in rainfall contributed to crop failure and food-price increases.
The second packages three processes as nouns.
Academic literacy therefore needs both directions:
clause → noun phrase
and:
noun phrase → underlying event
Reading nominalisation means decompressing it
The implementation of the policy resulted in the reduction of traffic congestion.
Decompress:
The government implemented the policy.
Traffic congestion decreased.
When a sentence feels abstract, turning nominalisations back into verbs can reveal the event chain.
Nominalisation can hide agency
The council demolished the building.
The demolition of the building caused public anger.
Who demolished it?
The noun demolition can exist without naming the actor.
Sometimes that is useful. Sometimes it hides responsibility.
Nominalisation can hide agency more completely than passive voice
The building was demolished by the council.
The actor can still be named.
The demolition of the building…
No grammatical slot requires an actor at all.
Critical readers should ask:
Who performed the underlying action?
Nominalisation can improve objectivity—or merely sound objective
Academic writers often foreground process or result rather than the personal actor.
But a sentence is not more reliable simply because it sounds abstract. Formality and truth are different dimensions.
Too much nominalisation creates noun fog
The implementation of the optimisation of the management of student learning outcomes resulted in improvement.
What actually happened? Who did what? What improved?
Too many nominalisations create stacked noun phrases, hidden agents, weak verbs and processing load.
Current research warns against over-reliance
Recent 2025 research on EFL academic and medical writing treats nominalisation as an important resource while also warning about dense nominalised structures in novice writing.
Nominalisation is a real academic resource, but density without control is not academic maturity.
AI can increase nominalisation density
We compared the two methods.
A comparison of the two methods was conducted.
The second sounds more formal, but it is not automatically better. It is longer, the agent is weaker and the action is less direct.
Nominalisation can help paragraph flow
The company reduced prices. This reduction increased demand.
The noun reduction turns old information into a compact topic for the next sentence.
Given and new information often uses nominalisation
Students retrieved vocabulary repeatedly over several days. This repeated retrieval improved retention.
The nominalised phrase packages the previous action as given information and allows the next sentence to add a new claim.
Not every nominalisation is useful
the utilisation of the tool
using the tool
A useful style test is:
Does the noun create a concept I need to refer to repeatedly?
If not, the verb may be clearer.
Use nominalisation when the process itself is the topic
Population growth accelerated after 2010.
The regulation of blood glucose depends on several hormones.
Here nominalisation is conceptual vocabulary, not decoration.
Prefer verbs when action and agency matter
The committee’s rejection of the proposal caused concern.
The committee rejected the proposal, causing concern.
The second keeps actor, action and sequence visible.
A practical nominalisation test
- What verb or adjective sits underneath the noun?
- Who performed the action or held the quality?
- What changed?
- Does the noun help the paragraph refer back to an earlier event?
- Would a verb make the sentence clearer?
Science example
The liquid evaporated quickly.
Rapid evaporation reduced the liquid volume.
The nominalised process can now act as the cause of another event.
Geography example
People migrated to the city.
Urban migration increased demand for housing.
History example
The government centralised authority.
The centralisation of authority weakened local autonomy.
The process becomes an analytical concept, while critical readers can still ask which actors performed it.
Parent-friendly practice
Give three verbs—decide, grow, improve—and ask for decision, growth, improvement. Then build one verb sentence and one noun sentence for each and discuss the difference.
Teacher-friendly diagnosis
Form-only knowledge: noun formed but discourse effect not understood.
Noun fog: too many nominalisations in one sentence.
Hidden-agency problem: actor disappears when accountability matters.
False formality: long noun phrase chosen only to sound academic.
Cohesion failure: nominalisation does not clearly refer back.
Decompression failure: student cannot recover the underlying event while reading.
Singapore relevance
Singapore Secondary students move from narrative and everyday explanation towards increasingly dense Science, Geography, History and expository English.
Nominalisation is one reason higher-level textbooks feel more abstract.
The safer rule is not “use more big nouns”. It is: turn an event into a noun only when the concept needs to become a stable object of discussion.
Hilary Mantel as a high-level literary lens
Hilary Mantel is useful here only as a high-level lesson in sentence control. Abstract nouns can compress history into labels such as reform, succession, betrayal or negotiation.
The transferable lesson is: every abstraction has an event underneath it.
AI and nominalisation
AI-generated formal prose often increases noun density. A useful audit is to identify every nominalisation, recover the underlying verb or adjective, identify hidden agents and decide whether the noun or verb version is clearer.
Connections eduKateAI can learn
verb/adjective → nominalisation → noun-based concept
event → nominalised discourse object → later reference
nominalisation → information compression + abstraction
nominalisation → possible hidden agent → accountability check
AI rewrite → nominalisation-density increase → clarity/agency audit
The public principle is that nominalisation changes an event or quality into a noun-based concept, enabling academic compression while potentially hiding action and agency.