Lawyers know how to kill good prose. Whether through passive voice, unnecessary jargon, pointless abbreviation, or poor organization, lawyers can turn the most compelling human drama into the verbal equivalent of Nytol.
One of the most powerful tools in this soporific arsenal is “nominalization”—i.e., transforming a verb into a noun. In legal prose, people don’t “act,” they take “actions.” Lawyers don’t “object,” they make “objections.” Their clients don’t “admit,” they make “admissions.” And judges don’t “decide,” they render “decisions.” Yawn.
Language maven Bryan Garner calls these words “buried verbs.” The metaphor is apt, as nominalization is the death of readable prose. Transforming a verb into a noun kills the action, fossilizing the word into a static noun. This bores the reader.
Nominalization takes many forms. It most often occurs with suffixes like “-tion,” “-ence,” or “-ment.” But sometimes it can be a silent killer, with the verb form closely resembling the noun form (e.g., “search” and “search” in the example below). And other times it is a shape-shifter, with the nominalization looking different from the buried verb (e.g., “steal” and “theft”).
Nominalization takes many forms. It most often occurs with suffixes like “-tion,” “-ence,” or “-ment.” But sometimes it can be a silent killer, with the verb form closely resembling the noun form (e.g., “search” and “search” in the example below). And other times it is a shape-shifter, with the nominalization looking different from the buried verb (e.g., “steal” and “theft”).
Where possible, it is almost always better to free a verb from its nominalization tomb. Doing so will shorten a sentence, which—other things being equal—is always a good thing. But eliminating nominalizations does more than that. It gives sentences a conventional syntax: subject, verb, and object. It is much easier to read that “Jack sued Jill” than it is to read that “Jack brought a lawsuit against Jill.”
Here are some examples to illustrate the point:
Before: The contract provided for indemnification of the contractor by the subcontractor.
After: The contract required the subcontractor to indemnify the contractor.
Before: The police conducted a thorough search of the premises, but found no contraband.
After: The police thoroughly searched the premises, but found no contraband.
Before: The computation of damages by the plaintiff’s expert failed to include a reduction of future lost earnings to present value.
After: In computing damages, Plaintiff’s expert failed to reduce future lost earnings to present value.
There are, however, occasions where nominalization serves a valuable purpose. Legal writing often needs to discuss actions or events abstractly and succinctly. It would be pointless in a criminal appeal to rewrite “Jack had three prior convictions” as “Three courts previously convicted Jack.” And how would you rewrite a pithy aphorism like “Necessity is the mother of invention”? Even the term “nominalization” is a useful nominalization, as it packages a concept in a readily discussable form.
Thus, eliminating nominalizations should be a rebuttable presumption, not an absolute rule. If, after analyzing a sentence, you can articulate a good reason for retaining the nominalization, by all means keep it in. But you will find that eliminating unnecessary nominalizations will liven even the deadest of legal documents.
No comments:
Post a Comment