The content of these guidelines is taken from the Vives University Network’s Interuniversity Style Guide for Writing Institutional Texts, an interuniversity project in which the UPC participated with the support of the Secretariat for Universities and Research of the Government of Catalonia.
Verbs and actions
- Readers understand sentences more easily if the verb expresses the action.
Compare the verbs in bold in the two sentences below.
| a) *Full payment of all outstanding fees must be carried out before issuance of degree certificates to students. |
| b) All outstanding fees must be paid before degree certificates can be issued. |
In sentence a), the actions of paying and issuing are expressed in the form of two nouns (payment and issuance), not in the verb (carried out).
- The technical term for expressing actions in the form of nouns is nominalisation. When you nominalise your texts, they will often sound abstract and dense because you use more abstractions and you require more words to express an idea. Note that the nominalised sentence above (a) is 17 words long while the verb-style sentence (b) is 13.
- We recommend that you use verbs that express actions. Do not conceal them in nominalisations.
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