I read quite a lot of books about writing and how to write for the PowerPoint book. Lots of good in all of them but the most useful thing was in Joe Moran's First You Write A Sentence. It was about 'nominalization'.
"Writing drifts into obscurity when it overuses a certain kind of abstract noun: a nominalization. A nominalization makes a verb (or sometimes an adjective) into a noun. It turns act into action, react into reaction, interact into interaction. It gives a process a name. According to the linguist Michael Halliday, the nominalization emerged in the seventeenth century, with the birth of modern science. To describe what they were doing, these pioneer scientists needed a way of turning single events into general laws. Before then, to explain nature’s workings, or to write up experiments, they had to use a full clause, with a subject and a verb. The apple fell from the tree because this small spherical object was drawn to a much bigger one, the Earth. Nominalizations let them hide clauses, which describe an event, inside a noun, which gave that event a name. The apple’s descent was a result of gravitation."
"Nominalizations pack a lot into single words. Science needs them so it does not waste time going over old news. It is quicker to say that a hummingbird’s hum is made by its rapid wingbeats (a nominalizing noun phrase) than by its beating its wings rapidly. But if you bury too many verbs under nouns, you shut out the layperson, for whom the stuff that is old to an expert is new. And even experts find sentences chock-full of nouns uninviting – even when they know what the nouns mean. Brevity has been bought at the cost of clarity and ease."
"In the 1970s, the poet Elizabeth Bishop taught writing seminars at Harvard. Shy and nervous leading classes, she still managed to produce a long, confident list for her students headed ‘If you want to write well avoid these words’. Many of the words were nominalizations, like creativity, sensitivity and ‘most ivity-words’. Others were those dressed-up noun categories that have crept into daily use and distance us from the real: life-experience, relationship, aspect, area, potential, structure, lifestyle. Lifestyle, which back then was hyphenated or written as two words, was also censured by Christopher Lasch in a style guide he wrote for his students at the University of Rochester in 1985. ‘The appeal of this tired but now ubiquitous phrase probably lies in its suggestion that life is largely a matter of style,’ he wrote. ‘Find something else to say about life.’"
This has been a really useful thing to understand when helping people write clearly and readably. Partly as a useful framework in itself, partly because when googling it I realised that people are taught to use nominalization at university. It's seen as academic and objective. So when they get asked to write in business life that's how they think they should do it. Being able to say 'you're in a different world now, do things differently' is quite helpful.