08 October 2013

Zombie Nouns

I went to a great talk by Helen Sword over the weekend (cool surname). She primarily helps academics be better writers, but a good sentence is a good sentence no matter the genre. One of the things she talked about really ticked my fancy: Zombie Nouns.

Zombie Nouns eat all the strong action words, verbs, adjectives and even other nouns, leaving the sentence to lurch forward. There is of course a real term for this nominalization (pretty much a zombie word all by its self).

However, I think Helen can describe this better than I ever could. Check out this video on zombie nouns :)


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