2.
Noun density

Key principles in this chapter:

• Anchor abstract ideas in concrete language and images.

• Illustrate abstract concepts using real-life examples. (‘Show, don’t tell.’)

• Limit your use of abstract nouns, especially nominalisations (nouns that have been formed from verbs, adjectives or other nouns).

If verbs function as the muscles of language, nouns form its bones. Sentences with ‘strong bones’ convey meaning and emotion through concrete nouns, which describe objects we can see, hear, touch, taste or smell, such as water, hands or moon. Sentences with ‘weak bones’ rely mostly on abstract nouns, which express intangible ideas remote from the world of the human senses. We can talk and think and argue about sadness and affection and reciprocity, but these concepts bear no physical weight.

Compare the following two accounts of the imaginative development of children, the first by poet Robert Morgan, the second by a team of psychology researchers:

Poet: More than

all I loved to slide the hatpins

like adjustable rods in the

plum-shaped cushion … I

knew without asking I wouldn’t be

allowed such deadly probes and heart-

picks. Some were long as witches’ wands

with fat pearl heads. They slid in the

cushion as through waxy flesh.

I extracted a cold silver

excalibur and ran it on

my wrist and stabbed at the mirror,

then froze, listening for her step.10

Psychologists: As children develop the ability to transition between states, they can be thought of as becoming less dissociative. In this way, non-pathological dissociation may be connected to Theory of Mind, inhibitory control and other metacognitive abilities of interest to developmental researchers. Another line of research has connected non-pathological dissociation to fantasy proneness or imagination.11

The poem illustrates how a grandmother’s hatpins become, in the eyes of a child, witches’ wands and magicians’ swords. Concrete nouns and vivid verbs – rods, cushion, probes, heartpicks, heads, flesh, excalibur, wrist, mirror; slid, extracted, ran, stabbed, froze – provide a window into the child’s mixed emotions of desire, fascination and fear. The academic article, by contrast, swathes children and researchers in a cloud of abstractions: ability, state, dissociation, theory, mind, control, interest. The authors offer us no descriptive signposts to guide our understanding, no heartpicks or excaliburs on which to hang an emotional or intellectual response.

And now here is a passage by Alison Gopnik, a psychologist who writes with a poet’s flair:

[A researcher] asked randomly chosen three- and four-year-old children and their parents a set of specific questions about imaginary companions. Most of the children, 63 percent to be exact, described a vivid, often somewhat bizarre, imaginary creature. … Many of the imaginary companions had a poetic appeal: Baintor, who was invisible because he lived in the light; Station Pheta, who hunted sea anemones on the beach. Sometimes the companions were other children but sometimes they were dwarves or dinosaurs. Sometimes the children became the imaginary creatures themselves.12

Concrete nouns – children, parents, creatures, companions; light, sea anemones, dwarves, dinosaurs – do double duty in this paragraph. First, they illustrate Gopnik’s central argument that children are ‘young scientists’ with a highly developed capacity for counterfactual thinking. Second, Gopnik has chosen examples calculated to engage and charm her readers. An abstract concept such as ‘non-pathological disassociation’ becomes much more memorable and inviting when it takes the form of an invisible friend called Baintor.

All too often, academics swarm to abstract language like pigs to mud; they wallow in big words and explain, explain, explain. Poets and fiction writers, on the other hand, prefer to illustrate abstract ideas through physical images and concrete examples: ‘Show, don’t tell’. For example, here’s how poet Emily Dickinson depicts hope, that most fragile yet resilient of human emotions:

Hope is the thing with feathers

That perches in the soul,

And sings the tune without the words

And never stops at all.13

Here’s how novelist A. S. Byatt conveys a character’s mixed feelings of nostalgia, passion and revulsion upon recalling a past love affair:

Her mind was full of an image of a huge, unmade, stained and rumpled bed, its sheets pulled into standing peaks here and there, like the surface of whipped egg-white. Whenever she thought of [her former lover], this empty battlefield was what she saw.14

And here’s how popular science writer Dava Sobel illustrates the historical importance of longitude, that made-up measurement by which human beings define their place on the globe:

The zero-degree parallel of latitude is fixed by the laws of nature, while the zero-degree meridian of longitude shifts like the sands of time. This difference makes finding latitude child’s play, and turns the determination of longitude, especially at sea, into an adult dilemma – one that stumped the wisest minds of the world for the better part of human history. … For lack of a practical method of determining longitude, every great captain in the Age of Exploration became lost at sea despite the best available charts and compasses.15

These authors show us that concrete language is the ally of abstract thought, not its enemy. Sobel’s descriptive passage contains more than a dozen abstract nouns: longitude, latitude, parallel, law, nature, meridian, time, difference, play, determination, dilemma, mind, history, method. However, the author grounds these intangible concepts in the physical world with active verbs (shift, find, turn, stump), tactile metaphors (sands of time, child’s play) and illustrative examples (‘every great captain in the Age of Exploration became lost at sea despite the best available charts and compasses’). Through her strategic use of concrete language, Sobel persuades her readers to care about the historical impact of an imaginary line. Picture the same subject matter in the hands of a less skilful author:

Latitude is a naturally occurring measurement that can be determined by a simple calculation of equatorial displacement. Longitude, by contrast, is a man-made construct that depends on the arbitrary designation of a prime meridian and therefore cannot be measured using conventional astronomical instruments alone.

Clear? Yes. Compelling? Not particularly.

Even when she does employ abstract language, note how Sobel favours punchy, varied nouns such as law, nature, mind, history and time over spongy, sing-songy ones such as measurement, calculation, displacement and designation. When you turn a verb into a noun by adding a suffix such as ment or tion (confine → confinement; reflect → reflection), you sap its core energy. Likewise, an abstract noun formed from an adjective (suspicious → suspiciousness) or a concrete noun (globe → globalisation) tends to lack substance and mass, like a marrowless bone. That’s why nouns created from other parts of speech, technically known as ‘nominalisations’, are colloquially called ‘zombie nouns’: they suck the lifeblood from potentially lively prose.16

Banishing zombie nouns – or even reducing their numbers – may require you to rethink your subject matter as well as your writing style. In extreme cases, you might even have to rewrite entire passages from scratch. The following excerpt from an academic article on business management is bloated with nominalisations:

The capacity of a decision unit to induce innovation implementation within an adoption unit is crucial to organizational success. Risk and complexity are characteristics of innovations that can lead to resistance within organizational adoption units. Communication costs, types of power, and communication channels are structural characteristics that can be used by a decision unit to overcome this resistance. The interaction of these factors can determine the degree of successful innovation implementation within organizations.17

What are the authors really trying to say here? The highly abstract title of the article, ‘Communication and Innovation Implementation’, does not help us out much. Nor do the abstract nouns and compound noun phrases (capacity, success, risk, complexity, characteristics, innovations, resistance, types, power, interaction, factors, degree, organizations; decision unit, innovation implementation, adoption unit, communication costs, communication channels), the noun-derived adjectives (crucial, organizational, structural), the leaden verbs (induce, lead, determine) or the multiple forms of be (is, are, are). This passage requires the editorial equivalent of gastric band surgery.

Once we have discarded most of the jargon, transformed decision units and adoption units into human beings, and located the paragraph’s centre of gravity, we end up with a small, hard core of meaning:

Organizations thrive on change; however, many employees resist new ideas that they perceive as too risky or complex. Successful managers break down such resistance by communicating with staff clearly and strategically.

Now the passage describes real people making real decisions about how to run a company, rather than automatons involved in ‘innovation implementation’. Concrete nouns (employees, managers) and active verbs (resist, perceive, communicate, break down) provide ballast for a few key abstractions (ideas, organization, resistance). Having trimmed the word count from 73 to 31 (a lard factor of 58%), we have freed up space for an example illustrating how structural features such as ‘communication costs, types of power, and communication channels’ can help bring about change within an organisation.

Examples, analogies and metaphors ground abstract theories in the physical world; in Shakespeare’s memorable phrasing, they give ‘to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name’.18 For example, ‘Big Bang’ theorist George Smoot deploys the image of a dust mote on an ice rink to describe the challenges faced by cosmologists investigating the background radiation of the universe:

We were looking for tiny variations in the smooth background temperatures, something less than one part in a hundred thousand – that is something like trying to spot a dust mote lying on a vast, smooth surface like a skating rink. And, just like a skating rink, there would be many irregularities on the surface that had nothing to do with those we sought.19

Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah illuminates the universality of the human condition by inventing a time-travelling baby:

Our ancestors have been human for a very long time. If a normal baby girl born forty thousand years ago were kidnapped by a time traveler and raised in a normal family in New York, she would be ready for college in eighteen years. She would learn English (along with – who knows? – Spanish or Chinese), understand trigonometry, follow baseball and pop music; she would probably want a pierced tongue and a couple of tattoos.20

Essayist Joan Didion draws on images of back alleys, sleeping pills and uncomfortable beds to illustrate the corrosive effects of self-deception:

The tricks that work on others count for nothing in that very well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself: no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn list of good intentions . … To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, Phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet . … However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves.21

If, after reading this chapter, you still doubt the emotional impact of concrete language, try sitting through a typical high school graduation address (‘We encourage our students to achieve their highest potentiality by continually striving for excellence’, blah blah blah …), then go home and listen to a recording of Martin Luther King Jr’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. on a hot August day in 1963. Through the first half of his speech, King read aloud from a prepared text drafted by a committee. But then he arrived at the following sentence, teeming with nominalisations:

And so today, let us go back to our communities as members of the international association for the advancement of creative dissatisfaction.22

At that point King laid his written text – and his abstract language – aside:

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

In King’s vision of a post-racial America, intangible concepts such as brotherhood, oppression, freedom, justice and character take on a physical presence and a human form: red hills, table, heat, oasis, my four little children, the color of their skin. And that is why, unlike the worthy platitudes of the typical high school principal or politician, King’s words still echo in our minds and hearts today.

Exercises

These exercises will sharpen your sensibility for concrete language and build up the noun density of your prose.

Grammatical forensics

Make a list of abstract nouns that carry the nominalising suffixes ion, ism, ty, ment, ness, ance or ence. Next, identify the grammatical root stock on which each of these nouns grows. In most cases, you will find that the noun stems from a verb, an adjective or both.

Examples:

• participation (noun) → participate (verb)

• conservatism (noun) → conservative (adjective) → conserve (verb)

• activity (noun) → active (adjective) → act (verb/noun)

• engagement (noun) → engage (verb)

• surveillance (noun) → survey (verb)

• excellence (noun) → excellent (adjective) → excel (verb)

Now write a sentence that contains two or more of the abstract nouns on your list.

Example: The children demonstrated their engagement through their participation in a range of activities.

Experiment with ways of communicating the same information more concretely, whether by converting some of the nouns to verbs or adjectives or by replacing abstract language with concrete examples:

• The children engaged in many different activities.

• The children played games, sang songs and told stories.

Abstract to concrete and back again

On a blank sheet of paper, write an abstract noun and draw an oval around it, adding six or more radiating spokes. At the end of each spoke, write a concrete image that exemplifies the abstract noun in the centre.

Example:

Now repeat the exercise, placing a concrete noun in the centre and abstract nouns at the spoke ends.

Example:

Just about any idea or emotion can be illustrated using concrete images. Likewise, a single concrete noun can invoke a surprisingly complex range of abstractions. Good writers exploit the relationship between concrete and abstract language by remaining attentive to the subtleties of both.

WritersDiet Test example 2

How are names for new disciplinary fields coined? Here a new (and fun) way to look at the history of such coinages is proposed, focusing on how phonesthemic tints and taints figure in decisions to adopt one type of suffix rather than another. The most common suffixes used in such coinages (‘-logy,’ ‘-ics,’ etc.) convey semantic and evaluative content quite unpredictable from literal (root) meanings alone. Pharmaceutical manufacturers have long grasped the point, but historians have paid little attention to how suffixes of one sort or another become productive. A romp through examples from English shows that certain suffixes have become ‘hard’ or ‘soft’ in consequence of the status of their most prominent carrier disciplines.23

WritersDiet fitness ratings:
verbs	Lean
nouns	Lean
prepositions	Needs toning
adjectives/adverbs	Needs toning
it, this, that, there	Lean
Overall	Fit & trim

Comments: In this exuberant abstract for a journal article, historian Robert Proctor intersperses ‘zombie nouns’ such as decisions, attention and consequence with unusual nouns such as tint, taint and romp. Active verbs (look, figure, grasp) contribute further energy and elan, while indigestible academic adjectives such as disciplinary, phonesthemic, semantic and evaluative become more palatable when washed down with easy-to-swallow words such as new, ‘hard’, ‘soft’ and even fun.24