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Don't Turn Your Verbs into Nouns

Sentence: TAKING INTO CONSIDERATION the literature review, the researcher focused the study demographic on multi-national companies who target Asian consumers.


Edited Sentence: CONSIDERING the literature review, the researcher focused the study demographic on multi-national companies who target Asian consumers.


Explanation: Conciseness is the ability to write what needs to be stated succinctly. In the example sentence above, the sentence begins with two verbs “taking” and “considering.” However, the second verb has been put in a noun form (consideration), which is called a nominalization.


To make the sentence more concise, I took the word from its noun form (consideration) and put it back into its verb form (considering) then deleted the unnecessary verb phrase “taking into.”


When editing your academic documents, look for instances where you have two verb forms, which is often the case anytime you have transformed a verb into a noun. To help you identify this issue, look up and study “nominalizations.”

Until next week, Happy Writing!!! Dr. V Writing Coach-Editor-Speaker Author of I'm Not a Writer...I am Just in Graduate School (order your copy at https://www.amazon.com/Not-Writer-Just-Graduate-School/dp/1533392919)

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