Representing actions with nouns
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Examples from a variety of text types | page 7 of 10 |
Newspaper reports
Students often have difficulty understanding articles in Hong Kong's daily press,
partly because of the frequent usage of nominalisations 
in news reports. Consider the following sentence from an article in a
local newspaper:
The increase in annual spending is set to rise within the projected rate of growth of the economy of five per cent a year.
Learners might find this sentence rather difficult to understand, partly because it
contains the words: increase, spending and growth. Each
of these words is an example of nominalisation; in this case, a noun which has been
formed from a verb 
.
Now consider this revised version:
Government departments will spend more money in the future than they do now, but they will not spend more than five per cent extra a year, because government economists have predicted that the economy will grow at this rate.
Note that this version is considerably easier for a reader to process and understand.
Some comments concerning these versions
 |
The rewritten version is longer and contains more verbs so that tense and
time can be made more explicit. |
|
The rewritten version contains more information about who does
what, ie government departments spend; government economists
predict ... |
|
The original, nominalised version is shorter, because the ideas can be expressed more concisely, but the writer expects the reader to be able to interpret the meaning based on prior knowledge of the subject. |
Introduction
Newspaper reports
