Telling stories about characters and actions:
"Once upon a time, as a walk through the woods was taking place on the part of Little Red Riding Hood, the Wolf's jump out from behind a tree occurred, causing fright in Little Red Riding Hood" (43).
We need to rethink sentence structure, supplementing the notion of a subject and a verb (the most basic components of a sentence) with the concept of characters and actions.
The Dreaded Nominalization
Often the difference between a clear style and an unclear style is the level of nominalization. Nominalization is the changing of verbs (and adjectives) into nouns, such as making the verb "to know" into "knowledge." This is a natural part of language, but some writers over-nominalize and produce prose like this:
Many colleges have come to the realization that continued increases in tuition are no longer possible because of strong resistance from parents to the high cost of higher education.
This sentence could be rewritten as:
Many colleges realize that continued tuition increases are no longer possible, because parents strongly resist the high cost of higher education.
Analyze the sentences in Exercise 3.2 (50).
Finding Nominalizations
Williams offers the following good advice:
Diagnosis:
Ignoring short introductory phrases ("In the meantime," "Although," etc.), underline the first seven or eight words in each sentence.
Look for three characteristics: 1) Sentences that begin not with characters, but abstract nouns. 2) Sentences that take more than six or seven words to get to a verb. 3) Verbs that are less specific than the actions buried in the nouns around them.
Analysis:
Find or invent your cast of characters. (Who is doing the action?)
Find nominalizations that name the actions those characters perform.
Revision:
Change the nominalizations into verbs and adjectives.
Make the characters the subjects of those new verbs.
Rewrite the sentence with conjunctions like because, if, when, although, why, how, whether, that.
Exercise 3.9