Nominalization

Yeah, I'm not gonna lie, nominalization is definitely a problem for me. In fact, I had to rewrite that sentence just to figure out how to use the word right. The act, on the other hand, that I commit all the time. I just took a midterm and it's definitely how I right for history tests. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, because I seldom have much to say on history midterms and nominalization makes it look like you had more to write than you really did. I bet most teachers have caught on to this particular trick, though. I think, for the most part, it's what we do in writing, but not in speaking. In fact, when speaking I think we do the opposite. An English friend of mine said she thought it was funny the way Americans were always changing nouns into verbs. For instance, we would say "Are we gonna LUAS it" instead of "Are we going to take the LUAS" when we talked about whether or not we wanted to ride the train/tram thing into town. I guess it makes perfect sense that in talking we take the shortest route and in writing (specifically academic writing) we take the longest possible path to our meaning.

I guess I spent more time reflecting on how we verbify (yes, I know this isn't a word) our nouns rather than nominalize our verbs, but that's really all I kept thinking about as I read the section on nominalization.