Nominalization Finder
Paste a draft to find its nominalizations — nouns such as decision, analysis and importance that have a verb or an adjective hiding inside them — and the phrases that prop them up, like make a decision. Every highlight comes with the word to try instead, and the sentences that carry the most are listed first. Free, no sign-up.
Runs entirely in your browser — your text is never uploaded.
Paste or type some text to see its nominalizations — the nouns with a verb or adjective hiding inside them.
How to Use the Nominalization Finder
- Paste your text. A paragraph is enough to see the pattern, and a whole paper works too. The analysis runs in your browser as you type.
- Read the highlights. Rose marks a verb-weakening phrase (made a decision), amber a known nominalization (implementation), and blue a possible one found by its ending. Hover over a highlight for the verb or adjective to try.
- Start with the dense sentences. The list under your text shows every sentence carrying three or more nominalizations — the likeliest places for an action to be buried in nouns.
- Rewrite, then judge. Turn the noun back into a verb and give it a subject. Keep the change only if the sentence is clearer; plenty of nominalizations are the right word.
What a Nominalization Is
A nominalization is a noun built from another part of speech: decide becomes decision, investigate becomes investigation, important becomes importance. The writing scholar Helen Sword calls them zombie nouns, because a sentence full of them has had the life drained out of its verbs. Compare The implementation of the policy led to a reduction in absenteeism with When the school implemented the policy, absenteeism fell. The second version names who acted, puts the action in a verb, and is three words shorter.
The finder works in three tiers, from most certain to least:
- Verb-weakening phrases — a light verb such as make, conduct, give or have carrying a nominalization: conduct an investigation of → investigate, is in agreement with → agree with, give consideration to → consider, a decision was made → decide.
- Known nominalizations — a curated list of a few hundred common academic nouns, each paired with the verb or adjective inside it: utilization → use, effectiveness → be effective.
- Possible nominalizations — other long nouns ending in -tion, -sion, -ment, -ance, -ence, -ity or -ness, flagged only in the classic zombie frame the ___ of, and never everyday nouns such as government, population or university.
Padded phrases that are not built on a noun — due to the fact that, in order to — are the Wordiness Checker's job; this tool goes after the nouns.
Worked Example: Before and After
The Try an example paragraph is deliberately heavy: the finder marks 15 nominalizations in 87 words — about 17 per 100 — and every one of its four sentences lands on the revise-first list. Here is the first sentence rewritten with the verbs the tool suggests:
Before
The implementation of the new attendance policy was followed by a reduction in absenteeism, but an analysis of the data suggests that this improvement was not uniform across schools.
After
After schools implemented the new attendance policy, absenteeism fell, though the data suggest it fell more in some schools than in others.
The rewrite drops all four flagged nominalizations, gives the action back to the schools, and is shorter. It also shows where to stop: attendance is a nominalization of attend, but in attendance policy it names a thing the school manages, so it stays.
When to Keep the Noun
Nominalizations are not errors. Academic writing needs them to name concepts, methods and measures — motivation, regression analysis, academic achievement — and to sum up an action already described (this decision). The finder leaves common field terms such as thematic analysis and exclusion criteria alone, but you are the judge of the rest. Rewrite when the noun hides who did something, when nominalizations are chained with of (the evaluation of the implementation of the policy), or when a light verb is doing the work a real verb should. Keep the noun when it is the thing you are measuring or discussing.
Frequently Asked Questions
- What is a nominalization in writing?
- A nominalization is a noun formed from a verb or an adjective, usually with a suffix such as -tion, -ment, -ance, -ity or -ness: decide → decision, assess → assessment, relevant → relevance. Turning actions into nouns makes prose more abstract, because the noun can stand without saying who acted.
- What are zombie nouns?
- Zombie nouns is Helen Sword's name for nominalizations, from her 2012 essay in The New York Times. Her point is that piling them up drains the life from a sentence: the verbs go limp and the people disappear. She does not ban them — she asks writers to notice when they have taken over.
- Should I remove all nominalizations from academic writing?
- No. Many are the precise term for a concept (inflation, motivation, regression analysis), and some are needed to sum up an action you have just described. Revise the ones that hide the actor or stack up with of, and keep the rest. The finder's suggestions are prompts for that judgement, not corrections.
- How many nominalizations per 100 words is too many?
- There is no agreed threshold, and the right number varies by field — a methods section will usually run higher than a reflective essay. Use the density figure to compare drafts of the same piece, and look first at the sentences with three or more, which the finder lists separately.
- What is a light verb, and why does it matter?
- A light verb carries little meaning of its own — make, take, give, have, conduct, perform — so the meaning moves into the noun after it: make a decision, perform an analysis. Replacing the pair with the verb inside the noun (decide, analyze) usually makes the sentence shorter and more direct.
- Does it work with British spelling?
- Yes. It recognizes -isation endings (optimisation, characterisation) as well as judgement and fulfilment, and suggests the verb in the same spelling: optimisation → optimise.
- Is my text uploaded anywhere?
- No. The finder runs entirely in your browser; nothing you paste is sent to a server or stored.