Beware of nominalizations (AKA zombie nouns) - Helen Sword 

Oh, your comment uses two nominalizations.

It's four: inclusion, nominalizations, impression, professionalism.

Including nominalisations may evoke professional impressions.

So if you nominalise, you sound professional? That is unacceptably dehumanising!

@@robertluo3505 And yours uses one. In my reply, not one word is nominalised! It is most vigorous out of all of ours. Go ahead and give me a reason NOT to boast!

I pity your teacher

netsuj yenrav lol

ThePCguy17 don't blame the player, blame the game

PlagueBoy I am pitying, not blaming. Perhaps criticizing for a lack of creativity, but not blaming. After all, I play the same game.

ThePCguy17 it's not for creativity, the school system relies on stretching out dull, half-baked ideas

+ihaveagun22 hahah, true!!

+ihaveagun22 Skeletons with one too many finger joints.

+ihaveagun22 In all fairness, "zombie" is a walking dead person in some stage of decomposition... I'd say Skeletons are highly advanced zombies...

+ihaveagun22 a zombie is just a corpse revived skeletons are corpses

+jordanana hulbert ok then why do mc skeletons exist?

Sam Eileen 😂

Shreiking nouns will shock your soul and seal your doom tonight.

Spooky scary nominalizations are so misunderstood they only wanna nominalize, but I don't think we should

Those who overnominalise their discursive sentences, ARE pompous and abstract, not merely tending to sound so! Note that not one noun made from another lexical category, has remained in my version of 1:25.

They don't sent shivers down your spine. They initiate the _emission_ of shivers down your spine.

Well it’s also like 90 pages long and ain’t nobody got time for that 😂

@@SilverTune oh, let's not lie. everyone has time now. we're just lazy lmao

They don’t even have to be that long, they’re made that way to be confusing so no one will read them.

Some non lawyers read them as well and can't make sense of it. Most people are not taught to read a document with all uppercase letters.

@@ilikeceral3 Agreed. They're intentionally long to prevent people from reading it, realising they don't agree with the terms and accepting it anyway.

Isn't the use of passive voice intentional? I was always told in school to avoid acknowledging any impression the scientist leaves on the science, so as to create a voice of objectivity.

@@benjaminkrawciw6186 I was about to say that

@@shaizeeshows1850 Scientific writing is a human endeavour and is therefore not immune to trends as we decide how to best communicate science. Scientific writing today is mildly different from in the 1950s and very different from scientific writing in the 1600s. Tones change, styles change, even the format of publication changes. Newton and Darwin worked for years before collecting all their results into a literal book and they then published. Today, we publish months to years of work in short articles instead. With regards to active vs passive voice, my scientific writing teacher put it as follows. We as scientists should strive to be as objective as possible while doing our experiments. That goes without saying. But how you write your scientific articles, whether you use active voice or passive voice won't change what you already did. If you were biased or failed to be objective during your work, writing in the passive voice won't fix that. Therefore, why not write in the form that is easiest to read? Scientists are typically not trained explicitly for scientific writing. We are trained in how to design experiments with the proper controls, trained in our techniques, trained in the analysis. But somehow, communication is rarely something for which we are trained to do. And so, most scientists model themselves after what other papers do, which is sometimes an excessive amount of nominalization, passive voices, and overly complex sentence structures. Nominalization and passive voice are not always the same thing. In fact, nominalizaion sometimes help us write in the active voice. Consider: "Following stimulation by the agonist, the degree of phosphorylation by the cells was increased by 50% relative to control conditions." If we turn this into the active voice by putting the observer back in, we could write: "We stimulated the cells with the agonist and observed a 50% increase in the degree of phosphorylation." That's not bad. It's definitely easier to read. But for me, unnecessarily wordy. Personally, I would compromise and use nominalization to shorten the sentence and write: "Agonist stimulation increased phosphorylation by 50% relative to control conditions." In that last sentence, we now have an active voice to show that a specific manipulation caused an effect. So we put the manipulation as the subject and use nominalization to very specifically describe what effect the manipulation had. Yes, the use of passive voice was intentional. But we now realize it often impedes scientific communication by making articles more difficult to read. So we're slowly trying to teach new scientists to write differently. To me, the biggest problem in scientific writing is the overuse of the passive voice. Excessive nominalization sometimes leads scientists, especially the majority untrained in scientific writing, to excessively use the passive voice. But I think that nominalization combined with the active voice can be very effective.

@@shaizeeshows1850 not gonna lie you don't deserve a spoonfeeding.

I don't get this hate the passive voice receives sometimes. It's useful to background unnecessary information. And tbh if you struggle with sentences like "the analysis of the data suggests a high correlation between smoking and lung cancer" and you would prefer it to say "After we analysed the data we found that people who smoke correlate highly to lung cancer" or something, the problem may be you. I get the frustration when you have a sentence that also happens to be a whole paragraph and that's full of passive voice and nominalisations, but oftentimes using the passive voice or nominalisations is just practical.

***** Maybe if you diversify your vocabulary, you wouldn't have so much trouble "decrypting" the english language.

Actually, I have a very diverse vocabulary. Top 98 percentile (out of the entire state) in high school on my SATs. So no, vocabulary is by far the least of my vernacular problems.

***** So how could you say it is like a code? Everybody should understand if their's no technical term. Word have meaning, precise meaning, and sometimes the shortest way to express a complex idea is with words like these. The video put a clear example with two very different sentences, and claimed they meant the same thing. If you don't know the precise meaning of the word, you can't see the subtil differences in a code of law when they use different words. I don't believe you get this much problem if you claim you are in the 98th percentile...

It doesn't matter if words have a precise meaning on their own. However, when used in context with each other, and when modified well beyond their own original context, their meaning can very quickly deteriorate. This very factor has lead to a few wars in history, because some one was too convoluted with how they said something, or did not make themselves clear enough. If it was as easy as you make it sound, we wouldn't have to 'clearify language and meaning' every so often in things like government policies or union handbooks, or any rule book for that matter. These things go through periodic reviews and changes to make sure what is being said is as clear to all reading it as possible. A single word can be taken in context by itself, but the over all meaning it lends itself too can be vastly changed by the way it is used, and with what other words. Simplest I can think of....this one phrase alone is an example. "Dog eating chicken." With that alone, depending on where you put the emphisis, it means two different things.

You are absolutly right, words are very important with many subtelty. You must use every word you can to make it as clear as possible. Nominalization are a perfect way to do so, and everybody can understand them. We're talking about precise idea explained in detail, not about litterary work. Why shoot you in the foot by ommiting the use of certain word solely because you don't like their esthetics, the way they sound, the way they work? If you don't understand, it's simply because you're not use to it, the same way someone not use to poetry couldn't grasp the full beauty of certain complex poems. You need some background references to catch everyting, the same with "nominalization".

Nice name and profile pic. 10/10

you dropped this 👑, oh nevermind.

I think a lot of us go through that phase. I am still trying to snap my 30 year old boyfriend out of it. Editing his writing is a nightmare.

It depends on what you are writing, but if it was just a personal project and you liked your writings like that, there was be no problem in using the nominalization. If it made you a better writer is subjective. Some people might like and some people don’t.

All language is abstract, but it's more 'flowery' (actually intelligent) when you aren't trying to *sound* intelligent.

Autological. Also homological. I Googled it for you lol. the opposite is heterological a word that does not apply to itself (for instance the word German is *not* a German word)

Edward Teach Is heterological a heterological word?

Ari Evans No, but you did open a nice paradox.

@@arievans1723 It depends. If heterological is autological, then it's heterological. If heterological is autological, then it's heterological.

@@wachyfanning So in either case, it is heterological. That means it does not apply to self; that's hypocrisy!

Well said.

hahahahahahaha omg, apparently you have never read a horrible text from humanities in german.

Imagine if suffixes and prefixes weren't used in fields like organic chemistry and music theory it'd be impossible to refer to anything without already having remembered an arbitrary word

I love your metaphor right there. Well said!

Wow thank you. That was really well put. Respect!

+Ben Hensley finally someone!

+Ben Hensley Mightn't they just be very old zombies?

+Ben Hensley Maybe the zombie's flesh has fully decomposed.

SKELETON WARRRR!

Isn't an animated skeleton technically "undead?" Maybe an "anorexic zombie?"

Grundstücksverkehrsgenehmigungszuständigkeitsübertragungsverordnung

([regulation on the delegation of authority concerning land conveyance permissions)]

While bearing fully in mind that different languages are different and each have their own standards of writing and vocabulary, I must confess that I found large quantities of enjoyment from seeing what compound words have been invented and used in German. Strassenbahnhaltestelle (pardon my spelling) is a personal favorite of mine, it's fun to say.

WebBowser Yeah, each language is cool on its own pros and cons. That seems like a fun attribute in German which also has the Yonder part of speech that is unused in English IIUC; same in Japanese that has this.

Amit Markel The Yonder part of speech? What’s that?

Nah, no feelings is not fun and realistic to read and relate.

@@AquaMarino sure, it's less fun or relatable, but the grammar parses more easily to me.

Agreed. While the original Bible verse was definitely more interesting, the Orwellian version seemed like something that one would read in a research paper.

subjunctivizing everything you say just to avoid ALL nominalizations (and nominalizations are examples of a SIMPLIFIED language that relies on prefixes and suffixes) would be a great mistake unless you goal is to appeal to emotionally stunted 3rd graders and below, which I know many spoiled people are.

Only some?

You didn't understand the video.

@@yamadakaito764 Please explain and esucatw instead of just writing that

The video’s now saying “herr derr nominalization bad root word good” it’s saying “nominalizations sometimes make the sentence unclear”

You literally just repeated what the video just explained 🤣

@@iii8410 Although that first example made it seem as if the two ment the same thing, which they don't.

I can see you are fond of zombie nouns with your "objectivity"

you seem under the impression that 'zombie nouns' are inherently bad. I recommend watching the video (again): ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-dNlkHtMgcPQ.html I did use two 'zombie nouns' because my sentence had two equally important objects. these are my key words. apart from that I think my sentence is fairly comprehensive. my original point was simply that we cannot expect academic writers to trade accuracy for a writing style used in the bible.

I agree with you that they are important to academic texts. However they are also very useful in all genres including fiction. While an over abundance might be confusing they are great overall. Ex: I am a failure. Failure is a nominalization; did that lower your comprehension of the sentence? Didn’t think so

LimeGreenTeknii write and/or speak plain in the first place, saves time

Ooh yeah that is what I do; when I have no ideas about what to write I just write something boring then fix everything about it until the whole thing if different, too

One of the best pieces of writing advice I ever got in regards to this is to write whatever comes to mind even if it takes a whole page or more and then take out everything that doesn’t absolutely need to be there and then polish up what’s left

Samuel Prince I respectively disagree. They don’t always make the writer seem pompous and can be used to get a point across and add more possibilities to writing. For example at 3:46 it is pointed out that failure is a nominalization but using it doesn’t make one seem pompous or abstract and can help get a point across. Also it is usually easier to use them than to have have to think of how to say the same thing and still have the sentence fit in with others around it.

huh, thats funny, your last sentence could be an example of overuse of nominalization, dont you think? 'laziness is not equal to innovation'-- 1/3 of your sentence has been nominalized, when all of them could have been in their root form. Howevet, that does not mean that it is hard to understand your sentence, does it? If you had to change them all to their root, (adjective and verb respectively) 'Being lazy is not equal to having to innovate', it would sound rather long and unwieldy. If you would truly be opposed to the use of nominalization, you would edit your entire previous comment to have no nominalizations, perhaps illustrating your point that nominalization adds little to nothing, or perhaps illustrating my view instead-- that proper use of nominalizations can benefit users

As always, anything that isn't used in moderation becomes harmful.

Quetzalcoatl™yes. Is the low-brow short-form of the word nominalization 'bullshit'?.

Schoolmasters' BasicMilitaryRiding en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_Affair

Quetzalcoatl™ I never knew of this before, thanks

+Quetzalcoatl™yep, and ironically, the field I've encountered the most kind of this stuff is in linguistics

eupf horia LOL

i call them boring bureaucrat words. sometimes you need them, but don’t overdo it or else it gets boring

when you put it like that it reminds me of simplifying a math expression!

To which I'd reply in the same format with the character looking over the tulips, which are labelled "aggressive use of jargon," accompanied by a caption that would have him say "no, these are pigeons."

Myotis Welwitschii it’s pretty common in English as well (though you probably already knew that) and it generally is normal because it doesn’t cause any confusion whatsoever unless there are too many nominalizations

@@katherinebreland5784 Yeah, it might be used in both languages, but a LOT more in German.

Excuse me but this is why German is too difficult to learn.

makes sense coming from a country who’s whole thing is just smashing random nouns together and seeing what happens

@@wren_. It is really funny because while it is really random and feels like it should be intuitive, it is actually really hard for foreigners to learn German grammar because there are so many weird rules that are just super instinctive for people growing up with it. Like we have words that are technically neural gender, but a lot of derivatives are male and in certain cases it just randomly becomes female. And honestly, you can smash words together in English too. Like 'volunteer west train station train operator trainee'. Only because you leave spaces in there it's the same principle.

Its like the fear of long word

*video

you can edit your comment.

hahahahahahhahahaha! the burn! xD

but technically arent zombies reanimated corpses, arent skeletons corpses?

"Anorexic zombies," then.

Especially with Latinate words, yes. It gives to me the felicitations.

Yes, probably because English isn't my first language, I had very difficult time understanding that Bible verse.

The biblical example is less about being concise and more about being engaging and having a vibrant style. It makes your mind work to understand the meaning without boring or confusing you with dead language. I didn't appreciate that style of writing, either, until I took AP English Language and Composition (thank you, Mrs. Valaitis!).

The difference is it’s full of imagery rooted in experience instead of abstract concepts. I love abstraction myself, but in this case I think the point is less effective in Orwell’s passage because it lacks any tangibility or visceral connection to the daily realities of life

I feel relieved to see that no one's utilising nominal nouns

+Even Andy you can blame collage papers for that. They HAVE to be a particular word count or you get in trouble and the paper might not count O_o

Rosalie Kitchen I guess though when they get to the level when they are writing academic papers they no longer have a word count, surely then they should write concisely? I guess I'll see when I come to write proper stuff

+Even Andy Yeah that is a huge simplification. First of all, although it is true that majority of researchers are not great writers, the same could be said of novelist or any layman.. Yet, the abstraction and nominalization they use is necessary since it allows them to communicate complicated ideas in a precise way to other experts within the field. However, it is worth noting that in academia what matter the most is the finding of the paper not necessarily how it is communicated. And no researchers are not limited by a specific word count that ridiculous since for instance in mathematics the proof for Fermat's Last Theorem was 150 pages long... However, they do have to pay more to get a longer paper publish which can motivate them to write their ideas more concisely. This video was discussion literary writing not academic writing. It is a grave error to think that one particular writing style trumps all others. Instead the style used should depend on the authors intent and his target audience.

+Even Andy Well of course. When in academia have you ever seen an assessment without a word limit? (besides time-based exams) The problem is that people who teach academia and write research papers had to jump through academic hoops to get where they are now. Academia teaches us to convolute and drag all the meaning out from our sentences to reach a certain word limit, remain within a word limit, or adhere to the markers preferred style of writing. The older I grew the more I noticed that my most intelligent peers struggled to learn anything in school/university.

+Even Andy Corporate speak seems to be a subset of this language use.

Plot twist.

Elly Marshall me too 😂😂😂

You misspelled "Tthe".

Die Jombie man

Thank you, Snopes.

Whats the root verb, "to episteme"? It was a bad example in an already bad video.

O

Oxidizing

You mean oxidation reaction? Oxidization isn’t used because it’s just an unwieldier word for oxidation.

The point is that if you have too many nominalizations in one sentence it sucks the life out of your writing. You can still use them, just not too much. That's the kind of thing that makes me not want to read a textbook.

You can say that's the point of the video, but that's not what she said. She leaves a nominalization in for one example, but goes on and on about how they are undead zombies and saying you need to avoid them entirely. The lack of nuance is something I see on Cracked.com, but I thought TED was better than this.

The trouble is that I don't understand the alternative without the nominalisations. The Bible passage made no sense.

not at all. I didn't understand the verse until I read Orwell's version

Franchesca Mia I understand a difference of preferences and can respect that (and think the video goes too far), but are you seriously saying that you didn’t understand the meaning of the verse? Even just by understanding “the battle is not to the strong” and seeing the parallel logic between that and the other statements, the ending “time and chance happeneth to them all” seems to be pretty clear. Or really even if you just understand that last bit If you can fully comprehend Orwell’s version, I find it somewhat perplexing that you couldn’t even glean the basic meaning of the original (English translation of the) passage

@@littlefishbigmountain truthfully it might be me getting caught up with the first part of the verse, I found it confusing, being that English isn't my first language. In my opinion Orwell was much more straightforward, but to each their own.

Franchesca Mia It’s true that the beginning is a lot clearer in context as the image evoked by that phrase is repeated throughout the book, and I suppose if you’re starting off slightly confused then you’re likely to be distracted from the rest of it But yeah, to each their own. That was the point of my first paragraph. I wasn’t comparing the two, just commenting on an inability to understand the first text, especially given the verbal capacity to understand the second one. Then again, some people think more in pictures and some people think more in words. Those at one extreme or the other tend to have pretty strong predilections towards certain writing styles, understandably so. Plus I think a lot of it comes down to the kinds of experiences we have and the manner in which we’ve received various forms of education (both formal and informal). All these factors and more determine what we relate to on a personal level, i.e. what connects with us

I prefer the original. It's poetic and left much more room for multiple meanings and ideas.

+Andrew Halverson no, i find it was easier and had no problem understanding the second example , too many unnecessary big words in it.

The second part of your sentence, after the "but", needs a subject.

thx ! I have taken out the "but", does it make more sense now?

Lucky One yes, very nice. It is a perfectly legitimate opinion.

+Andrew Halverson, I don't think the narrator is talking about just "understanding," I think she's talking about vivid, active sentences. That is, sentences that don't get overloaded with just nouns, but with nouns that do something. I understood both passages, with the Biblical version being much more poetic and thoughtful. Oh, and there's no need to quote the word satire... It *is* a piece of satire. Orwell wrote the book that passage came from as satire. Again, he wasn't trying to make the Bible passage clearer, he was trying to show that we've taken poetry and life out of writing, and he was lamenting that. I think, Lovecraft would also lament the disappearance of poetry. Don't confuse long flowery sentences with long dead sentences.

xkcd.com/thing-explainer/

@@thekaxmax I'm not denying that there should be place for semplification of course, but also that if you want to approach a complex matter you cannot force simple words if you want to understand the whole complexity and not just the surface, Don't you think?

Yes but you see, it was dead, the Bible passage was illustrated so it was alive! You don't want your reader to understand clearly what you want to communicate, because that's what zombies do, living people communicate between themselves like 3 year-old infants, so be sure not to use any word that exceeds 5 characters or God will punish you!

...about your writing style rather than the contents. Bad move.

This video is just another English teacher telling you not to use the passive voice without telling you why. It has little to no value.

User agreements are written as such to convey the terms of the contract in the most objective manner possible. No misinterpretations of these terms ought to be made on the part of the user. If colloquialisms are used in an official contract, it opens up the possiblity of ambiguity. A contract rife with ambiguity is a legal catastrophe, any abuse of the contract on the part of the user is potentially excusable by loophole. User agreements aren't fabricated by intellectuals hoping to ensnare anyone, they are created to effectively display a contract. Understanding the diction of such a document is not difficult, it literally requires a sixth grade education and an IQ above 85. Now, simplicity is apt for informal conversation and it's often appropriate for fictional literature. However, it is never appropriate to use informal and subjective language in an academic paper or a contract, which a user agreement ultimately is. A great advantage for English is its complexity and its ability to describe a great many things with little ambiguity, this is the reason it is the international language of commerce. (That and the fact that Britain conquered much of the world.) I sure hope that the future of English does not lie in simplicity, because, afterall, simplicity is for simpletons.

Beat it, nerd!

Those two sentences do not even convey the same meaning. I can change it to "Lies hurt my feelings" and it would be equivalent to the second one, and would be more concise and to the point. The biggest difference between your two examples is not the difference of passive vs. active, but taking out the word "your". I would argue that by starting the sentence with the words "my feelings" is more ego-centric than starting with the word "lies", which addresses the fact and heart of issue more directly.

+Zackees "people in the ivory literary tower make a youtube video complaining that the other academics in the other ivory towers are making up words that displeases them and sound boring." sounds to me like this is a straw man fallacy itself. Who is complaining that this kind of language 'sounds boring'? The complaint is that it is often unnecessarily confusing or hides meaning

Let me correct that sentense so it sounds smarter: "To outsiders, a writers intellect seems to be proportional to nominalisation."

@@derfzgrld 6/10 smart

I applaud you, sir!

It's much much worse if you live in a Spanish speaking country. There is a cult of rhetoric, pompous words and convoluted writing unlike anything I've read written in English. Reading a paper in Spanish requires huge amounts of patience and you need to be able to tolerate the frustration you'll feel when, after looking up hundreds of obscure words and reading pages of text, you realize that exactly the same idea could have been written in a paragraph or two. The only exception is maybe engineers who tend to value being able to achieve the same in a simpler way.

Oh wow that reminds me of High School English class. The teacher would tell someone that their work was really good when all it was was the largest, longest and most rare words to be found in a dictionary shoved into a boring, bland and pointless piece of text. It annoyed the heck out of me that people were being rewarded just for using longs words.

shadowknowsjo So, details, evidence and all that good and plenty didn't matter but cramming in several unneeded words could get you a good grade?

The artist example isn’t true and you can actually use the former for all three of your examples.

Riley Batman, and very confusing besides

Detachment.

***** Agreed, they are both sexist dicks. Also as a point of clarity to all involved, I'm a guy, I'm a member of Mensa, my IQ is 150, and I'm undertaking an MSc in Astronautics & Space Engineering at Cranfield. It has been interesting to note people's assumptions though.

Tommy Harris I won't disagree - it was not for my English skills that I achieved my IQ score, and communication in all its forms has never exactly been my strong point; my strength is in understanding systems and processes, predominantly. Indeed it is due to this disparity that I initially posted here, so I thank you for the advice.

Nice to see everyone still getting along :P

She said academics... which are the ones publishing scientific papers.

Agreed but it's really hard to write scientific articles the way for instance the Bible was written. There aren't much subject nouns you can use when you describe how you did your experiments without using these zombie nouns, unless you keep saying we did this we did that

@@spl2285 the video points out positive and negative aspects of nominalizations: at best, it describes or means a concept, new or old, under different institutions, usually technical or scientific institutions. At worst, it's too objective or distant, especially when it's not one's field of expertise, and can be abused by those who do have the power to throw around words they have an idea of while their listeners have to grapple to find it's meaning or even worse, when they just agree or disagree without looking it up.

Thing is, it's completely necessary and perfectly reasonable to use terms like this in scientific writing a lot of the time. It can.be abused with everything, but I think most of the time scientific writing ends up sounding remote and technical because it *is* remote and technical. Quantum, quantity, and quantisation all refer to distinct and defined things.

Thomas Cavanagh lmao

I am laughing a lot.

Thomas Cavanagh NOOOOO.

+Thomas Cavanagh As a non-english native speaker, i don't understand the f**k you're talking about. xD

+Thomas Cavanagh Even if John Cabot lived until now, he couldn't have got this.

It's just another English teacher shaking her fist at the passive voice for no good reason.

Prescriptivists are people who have never worked outside of an environment that revolves around writing.

TL;DR

@@rmrav6247 Not a problem. It wasn't written for you,

@@rmrav6247 TL;DR: TissuePaper's reply. Plus add the word prescriptivist in there. Maybe add the sentence, "This video didn't seem to fit with the rest of TedEd."

Walking Skeletons and vampires . Both are zombies in technical sense .