Eating Words AND Brains: Zombie Nouns

Having persevered through an English degree at a small Christian, liberal arts college, I believe myself to be a competent writer.  I took only one class designed as a writing course, but most of my courses required me to write quickly, intelligently and concisely.  I went directly into graduate school after I graduated, and my master’s program in higher education teased even more writing out of me. Then I entered the workforce and suddenly the preponderance of my writing became very condensed and technical (see: cover letters) or long-winded and informal (see: blogging). The type of writing I was accustomed to producing dropped off very steeply.  Part of the reason I started this blog, specifically, was to make myself write more and write better.  However, that’s entirely a matter of self-policing and my audience.  Some of my readers love more academic/serious writing.  Some of my readers don’t mind a more casual, daily bread sort of approach. Acknowledging that academic streak in myself is why I clicked on this link about “Zombie Nouns” (OooooOOooooOOOh!) this morning (from a fellow former English major’s Facebook page). I think I manage to avoid this zombie noun trap (basically the idea is that people turn other types of speech into nouns to beef-up the fanciness of their writing.) Zombie nouns are created by adding add a suffix like ity, tion or ism (e.g. zombiality, zombination, zombiism). Fancy, right? While I think the “Zombie Nouns” title is pretty new, the fact of nominalization (which is a nominalization itself, bitches!), has been around since the language was created.  All this is to say, try to avoid it because zombie nouns make your writing really hard to slog through. If you are also into writing, this test site will tell you how fit your writing is. Drop in a writing sample and it will give you a fitness test. (I happen to use the “be” verbs far too often.)  Writer’s Diet wants me to use more complex verbs.  Blah, blah, I can use whatever words I want, thank you very much! When I drop this post in the test I get a “Fit & Trim” rating over all, but those gosh darn “be” verbs make my verb score a “needs toning”. We all have something to work on, I guess.

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