Nominalizations are a type of passive writing. They’re empty nouns. How do you know you’re nominalizing?
- There’s no subject in your sentence: The positioning of the statue was good. (The question of course, is who or what positioned the statue?).
- It’s accompanied by the words like a, an, the, his, her, these, several, of, utilization, sadness, taking. The taking of flight 456 was horrible.
It’s not that you can’t use nominalizations, but make sure you’re using them correctly. If you’re passing on important information or the sentence isn’t going to make sense, then tighten it up and toss in a subject.
The positioning of the statue was good.
The curator positioned the statue in front of the main entrance.
The taking of flight 456 was horrible.
When the Martians hijacked flight 456, it effected millions of lives.
