Tag Archives: nouns

How to avoid writing dull text

Plain language / Plain English, Thinking & writing, writing tip, , ,

Nothing makes a document duller than turning verbs (action words) into nouns (labels). So ‘inspect’ becomes ‘inspection’, ‘manage’ becomes ‘management’ and ‘use’ becomes ‘utilisation’ (my pet hate!).

Some people think words like these sound official and the sort of language that should be used in business documents. It’s just plain dull. If you replace action words with labels your writing will lose its vigour and power.

But worse than that, it hides meaning. For example, you can write ‘perform an inspection’ without clearly stating what is being inspected. But when you write ‘inspect the …..’ you are forced to say what to inspect, and perhaps what you are looking for.

In general, using verbs forces greater rigour in thinking and greater precision in writing.

And always choose the simplest word you can find in preference to impressive,  pompous words.

Write with verbs not nouns

Plain language / Plain English, writing tip, ,

It’s better to write ‘evaluate‘ rather than ‘make an evaluation‘; write ‘decide‘ rather than ‘make a decision‘. ‘Evaluation’ is a noun, ‘evaluate’ is a verb.

Use verbs (action words) to make your writing more lively.

When you write with verbs your writing becomes more engaging and energetic because you are using action words. And it can also help you reduce your word count.

Many noun forms end in …ion, …ent, so keep an eye out for them.

And I’d love to ban the word ‘undertake’- we only ever use that when we need it to accompany a noun.

So we write the wordy phrase ‘we will undertake an investigation’ rather than saying more simply ‘we will investigate’.

Choosing to write with verb forms rather than nouns is a simple change, but it can powerfully improve your text.