Vocabulary Bank

moving away from concrete actors and actions towards concepts

the person who can be held responsible for a specific outcome

the specific person or team responsible for the action

who is doing what — clear in verb-heavy prose, hidden in nominalised prose

here: the effort a reader must make to reconstruct who did what

standardised, reusable language that carries little new meaning

packing more meaning into fewer words — a hallmark of formal register

saying only what needs to be said, with no waste

here, humorously: to quietly kill off the action in a sentence

the more distant, precise style expected in memos, briefs and policy documents

softening a claim so it survives scrutiny

the internal writing rules of a specific publication or organisation

of Latin origin — often longer, more abstract, more formal in English

turning a verb or adjective into a noun (decide → decision, agile → agility)

the act of making something operational — a textbook zombie noun

a verb that has been converted into a noun and is no longer doing verb-work

to rewrite a nominalisation as a verb + subject

an early draft where you write actively and only nominalise later

Sword's phrase for an abstract nominalisation that has eaten the verb it came from