Nominalization (zombie nouns)
A verb turned into a noun, like 'decide' becoming 'decision', often hiding the actor and draining motion from a sentence.
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What it is
A nominalization turns an action or quality into a noun: 'decide' becomes 'decision', and 'investigate' becomes 'investigation'. The grammar is legitimate, but piles of these nouns hide who acted and force weak support verbs such as make, conduct, and perform. Helen Sword named them zombie nouns in a 2012 New York Times column, and the label stuck because the sentences really do shamble.
Reach for a nominalization pass when policy, academic, or corporate copy feels motionless. Find abstract nouns carrying the real action, restore the verb, and name the actor: 'We conducted an investigation of the outage' becomes 'We investigated the outage.'
Gotcha: not every word ending in -tion, -ment, or -ance needs surgery. Sometimes the concept itself is the subject, as in 'The investigation lasted two weeks.' Cut nominalizations when they obscure action or inflate the sentence, not because a suffix triggered a rule.
Ask AI for it
Run a zombie noun pass on this copy using active voice. Find nominalizations carrying an action, especially nouns ending in -tion, -ment, -ance, or -al. Rewrite weak verb-plus-noun phrases such as 'make a decision' as direct verbs such as 'decide', and name the actor only when the source establishes one. Keep nouns that name a genuine concept or object. Return the revised copy and a table of before, after, restored verb, and named actor.