What Is Nominalisation and Why Does It Appear So Often in Theses
Nominalisation in academic writing refers to the process of turning verbs and adjectives into nouns. “Investigate” becomes “investigation”. “Implement” becomes “implementation”. “Significant” becomes “significance”. On its own, this is not a problem — academic writing does use nominalisations, and some are more precise than their verb equivalents. The problem arises when nominalisation becomes the default mode for every sentence, which is extremely common in Malaysian postgraduate theses.
Why does this happen? Partly because heavy noun use sounds formal and academic to students who are trying to elevate their writing style. Partly because thesis writing draws on sources that are themselves heavily nominalised — journal articles in social science, management, and education often pile nominalisations together in ways that feel authoritative. Students absorb these patterns and replicate them. The result is thesis writing that feels dense, slow, and harder to read than it needs to be.
How Nominalisation Makes Sentences Harder to Follow
The core problem with overusing nominalisation in academic writing is that nouns do not carry action the way verbs do. When you convert a verb to a noun, you strip the sentence of its natural energy and force readers to work harder to extract the meaning. Compare these two versions of the same idea:
Version A (heavy nominalisation): “The implementation of the intervention resulted in the facilitation of improvement in the performance of students in the area of reading comprehension.”
Version B (clearer verb use): “Implementing the intervention helped students improve their reading comprehension.”
Version B contains the same information in fewer words and with a clearer subject-verb-object structure. A reader can parse it immediately. Version A requires the reader to untangle four nominalised nouns before they reach the actual point. When an entire thesis chapter is written in the style of Version A, examiners struggle to follow the argument — not because the ideas are unclear but because the sentence structure buries them.
Recognising the Most Common Nominalisation Patterns
To address nominalisation in academic writing, you first need to recognise the patterns in your own writing. Several suffixes are strong signals of nominalisation: -tion, -sion, -ment, -ance, -ence, -ity, and -ness. Words ending in these suffixes — “investigation”, “extension”, “development”, “performance”, “coherence”, “clarity”, “effectiveness” — are all nominalisations of verbs or adjectives.
Run a search in your thesis for “-tion” and “-ment” and look at the sentences where these words cluster. If you find sentences with three or four of these endings, that is a strong sign that the sentence would benefit from being rewritten with stronger verbs. “There was a demonstration of significant improvement in the achievement of students” becomes “students demonstrated significant improvement in achievement” — and even this can be tightened to “students improved significantly”.
When Nominalisation Is Actually Useful
Not all nominalisation in academic writing is bad, and it would be misleading to suggest you should eliminate it entirely. Nominalisation serves a legitimate purpose in several situations. When you want to refer back to a process already described, a nominalised form can create concise cohesion: “This implementation…” or “The findings from this analysis…” allow you to pick up a thread without repeating a full clause.
Nominalisation also allows you to package complex ideas into a noun phrase that then becomes the subject of a new sentence. “The fact that motivation mediates the relationship between feedback and performance has implications for teaching practice” is a legitimate use of nominalised structure to set up an analytical point. The issue is not the existence of nominalisation but the frequency and density of it. When every sentence in a paragraph leads with a heavy noun phrase and buries its verb in the middle, the cumulative effect is a chapter that exhausts the reader rather than engaging them.
Practical Editing Strategies for Reducing Nominalisation
When revising for nominalisation in academic writing, a practical technique is to identify the main verb in each sentence and ask whether it is currently a verb or a noun. If it is a noun — “the investigation was conducted”, “the implementation was carried out”, “the analysis was performed” — rewrite with the action as a verb: “the researchers investigated”, “the team implemented”, “the study analysed”.
Watch especially for the constructions “there was a…”, “it was found that…”, and “it can be seen that…”. These are almost always sentence openers that bury nominalised verbs. “There was an improvement in scores” becomes “scores improved”. “It was found that teachers experienced difficulty” becomes “teachers found it difficult” or simply “teachers struggled”. Each of these revisions shortens the sentence and moves the real action into a verb where it belongs.
Balancing Academic Formality With Readability
One concern Malaysian students often have about reducing nominalisation is that simpler sentence structures will make their writing sound informal or insufficiently academic. This is a reasonable concern, but it reflects a misunderstanding of what academic writing actually values. Examiners and journal reviewers are experienced readers who spend a great deal of time working through dense academic prose. Writing that is clear, precise, and easy to follow is not considered informal — it is considered skilled.
The goal is not to write like a newspaper or to abandon precision. The goal is to use nominalisations when they genuinely serve the writing and to choose active, verb-driven constructions when those serve better. A thesis that demonstrates this kind of deliberate control over language registers is far more impressive than one that simply layers nominalisation onto every sentence in the hope of sounding serious. Addressing nominalisation in academic writing is one of the most impactful revisions you can make in your final proofreading stages.
