Nouns That Hide the Actor

B · Plate 05 in the Plain Language series · Other Communications

Public writing has a characteristic way of removing people from sentences. It is usually blamed on the passive voice, which takes more criticism than it deserves. The larger culprit is the abstract noun built from a verb: the implementation, the alignment, the transition, the review. Once an action becomes a noun, it no longer requires anyone to perform it.

Consider a sentence reporting that a review of the process is under way. There is a review; it is under way; nobody is reviewing anything. The sentence is grammatically active and informationally passive, which is the combination that survives editing most easily, because a reader looking for passive constructions will not find one.

Two different problems

The passive voice hides the actor by moving it out of the subject position, where it can either be reinstated with a short phrase or left out entirely. It is a legitimate construction with legitimate uses: when the actor is genuinely unknown, when the object is genuinely the topic, or when the actor is so obvious that naming it would be noise.

Nominalisation is different in kind. It converts an event into a thing, and things do not have tenses, agents or completion. A decision was taken tells the reader less than someone decided, but it at least reports an event. The decision-making process is ongoing reports a condition, and conditions can persist indefinitely without anyone doing anything, which is occasionally the point.

The two often appear together, and the combination is the standard idiom of the uncomfortable paragraph. A revised approach to scheduling has been adopted following consultation contains an event, a change and a group of people, and names none of them. It can be rewritten in eight words by anyone willing to say who did what.

The repair

Find the abstract nouns ending in -tion, -ment, -ance and -ing, and ask what verb each was made from. Then ask who performs that verb. If the answer is available and not confidential, put it in the subject position and let the verb be a verb. Sentences shorten by a third and gain a fact each time this works.

Sometimes the answer is not available, and that is worth noticing rather than papering over. A writer who cannot say who decided something has discovered a genuine gap, either in their knowledge or in the decision itself. The abstract noun was concealing that gap from the writer as effectively as from the reader, which is the quiet damage this habit does inside an organisation.

When the abstraction is right

Not every nominalisation is a fault. Some name a real category of thing, discussed as a thing: a policy, an appointment, an inspection. The test is whether the noun could be replaced by its verb without loss. If the sentence is about the recurring institutional object, keep the noun. If it is about a particular occasion on which someone acted, use the verb.

The same test resolves most arguments about the passive. A sentence whose topic is the object should usually be passive; the parcel was delivered on Tuesday is about the parcel, and the courier is not the subject of the paragraph. A sentence whose topic is an action someone took should usually be active, and rewriting it passively in order to soften it is a decision about candour rather than about style.

The habit worth building is a single pass through a draft that asks only one question of each sentence: who does this. Nothing else. The pass is fast, it needs no judgement about register or rhythm, and it catches the constructions that make organisational prose sound as though it were produced by a building.