Commenting on a first draft
Active verbs and nominalizations
This point is well explained by Strunk and White, but here is my own
explanation...
Good writing is concrete; bad writing is excessively abstract. Concrete writing concerns itself with human beings, actions, and physical objects. Abstract writing concerns itself with concepts, static states of affairs, and things that cannot be visualized. Abstractions are not necessarily bad, of course, and we should not try to eradicate them. Instead, let us make our colleagues aware of the degree of abstraction in their writing, and then let us encourage our colleagues to move toward concrete language whenever possible.
In grammatical terms, the most important abstractions are the ones we call "nominalizations". A nominalization is a noun that has been constructed by adding grammatical inflections to a verb. The word "nominalization", in fact, is a good example of a nominalization. It is a noun. It is morphologically complex -- that is, it is assembled from a series of simpler meaningful elements (nomin + al + ize + ation). The root word, "nomin" is derived from a Latin word that means "name"; it is also found in words like "nominate". Most particularly, "nominalization" is a noun that has been created by adding various particles to a verb, namely "nominalize".
In general, then, a nominalization is a noun that has been created by inflecting a verb. Put in simpler terms, a nominalization is an abstract "thing" that names an action. Some nominalizations include "suggestion" (the underlying verb is "suggest"), "developer" ("develop"), "statement" ("state"), "behavior" (behave), "waiter" (wait), and "disappearance" ("disappear").
The first part of the assignment, then, is to go through the author's draft essay and draw a circle around every one of the nominalizations.
Next look at verbs. Verbs can be arrayed along a spectrum from weak to active. The weakest verbs include "be" (and all of its forms, including "am", "is", "are", "was", "will have been", and so on), "have" (as well as "has", "had", "will have", etc), and "do" ("does", "did", "had done", etc). Active verbs are verbs that name concrete actions that real people take: "run", "eat", "warn", "deliver", "rescue", "obtain", and so on. In the middle of the spectrum are verbs that name for abstract actions that people might take ("choose", "become"), or actions that are taken by abstractions. Strunk and White urge writers to employ active verbs wherever possible. This advice can be taken overboard, of course, and we don't want to outlaw weak verbs completely. But bad writing can often be improved by rewriting sentences with weak verbs so that they use active verbs instead.
The second part of the assignment, then, is to go through the author's draft and draw a box, ideally in a different color from the circles just mentioned, around the main verb of every sentence. For example, in the sentence "Mary threw the ball", the main (and only) verb is "threw". In the sentence "John caught the ball that Mary had thrown", the main verb is "caught"; "had thrown" is also a verb, but it is not the main verb of the sentence. In the sentence, "Mary had regretted hitting John with the ball", the main verb is "had regretted"; the word "hitting" is part of a subordinate clause the forms the object of "had regretted". So just draw a box around the main verb of the sentence.
Now let us bring the two parts of the assignment together. Bad sentences often have two features: a weak main verb and a nominalization whose constituent verb really ought to be the main verb of the sentence. For example, the sentence "Phil gave the students an assignment" could be rewritten as "Phil assigned the students ...", where the "..." provides some missing information, namely what the assignment was. Having gotten that far, one might decide that another verb would be more active, not to mention more precise: "Phil told the students to write comments on their colleagues' drafts". To take another example, "Mary used a browser to look around the Internet" could be rewritten as "Mary browsed the Internet".
The third and final part of the assignment, therefore, is to identify several sentences in the author's draft -- assuming, of course, that any such sentences exist -- that include both weak main verbs. Then rewrite a couple of them to give the idea.
Some cautions.
(1) Not every nominalization should be unpacked. We're not talking about a rigid formal rule here, but a heuristic rule of thumb. Not all sentences are improved be rewriting, and sometimes the nominalization is employed as a term of art whose technical meaning would be lost if its constituent verb were unpacked.
(2) The concept of "weak versus active verbs" is completely unrelated to the similarly-named concept of "passive versus active voice" in constructing sentences. For example, "Mary threw the ball to John" is written in the so-called active voice, and "The ball was thrown by Mary to John" is written in the so-called passive voice. Many writing instructors advise eliminating the passive voice. They are usually right, but once again, the rule should not be taken overboard.
(3) Some phenomena are similar to nominalizations but slightly different. Complex nouns can be constructed by inflecting adjectives rather than verbs; examples include "sweetness" (the underlying adjective is "sweet" and "depth" ("deep"). Sentences can often be improved by unpacking such words to liberate the adjectives they contain. Other words can be used as both verbs and nouns (and often, indeed, as adjectives too); examples include "stand" and "view". These words are no more abstract as nouns than they are as verbs, and so we shouldn't be prejudiced against them.
(4) Verbs can also be made out of nouns -- "finalize", for example. For the most part, these words are not as bad as nominalizations, simply because they are verbs and therefore denote actions. Nonetheless it is worth investigating whether sentences that employ these verb-ed nouns can be rewritten with simpler words.