Cannibals eat the flesh of fellow human beings.
And words can eat fellow words.
It depends on how you string them together.
How do you prefer to communicate with words: to clarify or to convolute, clutter, and confuse? To reveal or conceal?
That’s why Helen Sword, author of Stylish Academic Writing (Harvard University Press, 2012), refers to one type of words as zombie nouns.
Zombie Nouns: Nominalizations
Watch this five-minute video that Helen Sword narrates (based on her article “Zombie Nouns,” New York Times, July 23, 2012):
So as a general rule, use verbs instead of the related nouns when possible.
For example, [Read more…] about Zombie Nouns and Verbs: Why Nominalizations and Passives May Be Killing Your Writing