This lesson is about using nominalisation in academic writing.
Reasons for using nominalisation:
Making texts impersonal and authoritative
Nominalisation is turning actions (verbs) into nouns. This makes it possible to avoid using personal pronouns (I, you, she, he) as much.
Compare:
Following a hornet sting the normal reaction is burning pain, redness, irritation and itching. In this situation there may be swelling in the area around the bite.
Then really quickly my foot began to go red and swell up. It just got bigger and bigger. It itched a bit too. I was really surprised by how much it hurt.
The nominalisations have been written in blue. The spoken account is much more personal and uses active verbs.
Adding information
Nominalisation is particularly useful for Academic Task 1 because we can do several things to add information to nouns in English.
- Count: the two charts
- Describe: the two coloured charts
- Classify: the two coloured bar charts
We cannot do the same with verbs. It is only by changing verbs into nouns that we can add information words to a text in such a concise way.
Avoiding repetition
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