TIP #7: How to cure nounitis
A serious disease afflicting business writing these days is nounitis, the excessive use of nouns.
First diagnosed by Rupert Morris in The Right Way to Write (Piatkus, 1998), it’s infectious and widespread. But it’s also curable. How? Use more verbs. Here’s an example:
Our specialism is the provision of health solutions.
Sounds clunky, doesn’t it? Identify all the nouns (underlined) and you’ll quickly see it’s suffering from acute nounitis:
Our specialism is the provision of health solutions.
It’s bogged down by four abstract nouns, two of which end in the ‘–tion’ sound.
Remind me, what’s a noun?
It’s a naming word, or a person, place, object (e.g. a chair) or idea (e.g. freedom). The problem with nouns is they just sit there naming stuff, but don’t
do anything or
go anywhere. If the universal cure for nounitis is to use more verbs, what’s a verb? It’s an action or doing word. So apply the cure to Version 1 and you get:
We specialise in providing health solutions.
That’s better: we’ve got two verbs in
specialise and
provide, so we’ve already loosened the sentence up.
But there’s a problem: a big fat S.O.W. (Severely Over-used Word) is running around.
Provide. I’d put good money on the fact that
provide — and all its horrible relations — is the single most over-used word in writing, bar none. Not only that, but it carries the nounitis virus. Whenever you use the word, you have to follow it with a noun, e.g.
we provide advice, we provide support, we provide briefings, we provide guidance. Just use the verb:
we advise, we support, we brief, we guide. It works in most contexts.
As you’re banned from using
provide in the next version, that forces you to seek more verbs. So turn
solutions into
solve, add the magic word
your to personalise…
et voilà!
We specialise in solving your health issues/challenges/problems.
So how do you self-diagnose? How do you know if you’ve got nounitis?
Go through your text and note all the words ending in:
- tion (e.g. facilitation, implementation, collaboration, delegation)
- sion (e.g. conversion, provision, decision)
- ism (e.g. specialism, magnetism, terrorism)
- ity (e.g. capability, adversity, speciality)
- ment (e.g. management, judgment, assessment)
- ance (e.g. performance, maintenance, attendance)
- sis (eg analysis, diagnosis, paralysis)
- al (e.g. refusal, referral, proposal)
- age (e.g. wastage, appendage, verbiage)
- acy (e.g. advocacy, conspiracy, piracy)
- ure (eg departure, failure, enclosure)
- ing (eg landing, writing, feeding)
Take your writer’s scalpel and lop off those endings (technically known as ‘suffixes’) to revert to the root verb. You win in two ways: you invigorate your writing by using more words of action/doing, and you make it briefer, as the verb is always shorter than its noun equivalent.
Finally, here’s a lovely example from a law firm blog:
This may assist our arguments in favour of the deletion or amendment of the clauses.
The three abstract nouns
arguments, deletion and
amendment weigh the sentence down. Use more verbs and say
This may help us argue in favour of deleting or amending the clauses.
Three strong verbs and you’re cooking with gas.
~~~
Notes on these readability stats (excluding the italicised examples): my ASL (Average Sentence Length) is 17.5 words, tucked nicely within the recommended range of 15–20 words; none of my sentences is in the passive voice — yay!; my readability scores 67.0%, well above the threshold of plain English, which starts at 60% FRE (Flesch Reading Ease). I’d say ‘teacher’s pet’, wouldn’t you?
Want to turbo-charge your writing? Then join us on the next
rhetorica® open course in the City of London on Thursday 23 February 2017.
Click here to find out more.
