Curt's Style Response 2
From Mizzou Wiki
The third chapter is about how to use actions to make sentences clearer for readers. The chapter starts off by giving two sentences where the second is obviously easier to understand. The rest of the chapter is used to explain why the second sentence is clearer and how you can make your own writing easier to understand for readers. The key is to link characters to their actions instead of turning actions into nouns. The technical name for a verb being turned into a noun is nominalization. The author gives several examples of how to revise sentences to eliminate nominalizations, thus making the sentences clearer. The chapter ends with the author stating that nominalizations are not always a bad thing and it is actually very useful in some cases. He also gives some examples to support this.
In this chapter the author supported his argument very well. He gives many examples of sentences that have nominalizations and then goes through the steps of how to convert the sentences to not have any nominalizations. Each examples sentence has a slightly different structure to show how to make corrections in different situations, but they are all still similar enough that the examples seem repetitive. All the examples and corrections make sense and the resulting sentences are clearer than the beginning sentences making the examples effective.
I had never noticed the difference between sentences that use nominalizations and those that do not before reading this chapter. I think I tend to write sentences without nominalizations, but now I will be more aware of when to use them and when not to. It is still hard for me to spot nominalizations quickly and even harder to make the appropriate revisions, but with time and practice I will get better at it.
