Nominalisation in English: arrive becomes arrival, decide becomes decision, and why written English turns actions into things

English has a machine for turning actions into things. Feed it arrive and it gives you arrival. Feed it destroy and it gives you destruction. Feed it decide and it gives you decision. Grammarians call the machine nominalisation, and once you can see its output you will find it everywhere: in every news report, every scientific paper, every letter from a company that is about to disappoint you.

You already use it, whether you know the name or not. Make a decision, have a look, reach an agreement - each of these is a verb that has been turned into a noun and propped up by a small, nearly meaningless verb. The questions worth answering are how the forms are built, what the noun does to the rest of the sentence, and when you should run the machine in reverse.

The suffixes: history, not logic

There is no rule that predicts which suffix a verb takes. There are only families, and membership was decided centuries ago.

Adjectives feed the machine too: weak → weakness, able → ability, free → freedom. And note the pairs that shift their spelling or sound on the way through - decide/decision loses its d sound, explain/explanation moves its stress. The only reliable strategy is the one you use for irregular past forms: learn the noun with the verb, as one item. A learner who knows refuse but guesses refusement has learned half a word.

What the noun does to the sentence

Nominalisation is not just word-building. It rebuilds the whole sentence around itself, and it changes three things.

The actor can disappear. A verb demands a subject: somebody destroys, somebody decides. A noun demands nothing.

• The army destroyed the bridge. (the army is named)
• The destruction of the bridge took an hour. (by whom? the sentence has stopped saying)

This is the same vanishing trick as the passive voice, performed with different tools, and officials use both for the same reason: mistakes were made and the making of mistakes each dodge the question of who made them.

A weak verb moves in. Once the action is a noun, the sentence still needs a verb, so English supplies a nearly empty one: make, have, give, take, reach, come to.

• decide → make a decision
• discuss → have a discussion
• explain → give an explanation
• agree → reach an agreement

These pairings are fixed and have to be learned: you make a decision but you cannot do one, you have a look but you do not give one to yourself.

A whole event becomes a thing you can talk about. This is the honest power of nominalisation, and the reason it exists. Package an event as a noun and it can be the subject of a new sentence, carrying everything with it:

• They decided to close the hospital. This surprised nobody.
• The decision to close the hospital surprised nobody.

The second version is tighter, and it is the only comfortable way to hang an opinion on an event. Academic writing runs on this pattern, one sentence's claim becoming the next sentence's subject.

Why formal English loves it

Put the three effects together and you can see why written English leans this way. Nouns hide actors, which suits anyone avoiding blame. Nouns compress, which suits anyone with a word limit. And nouns sound settled and objective - the growth of the economy reads like a fact of nature, while the economy grew reads like something somebody might argue with.

None of this is wrong. A page with no nominalisation at all reads like a children's book. The trouble starts when the habit runs unsupervised, and you get sentences where every action has been embalmed:

• The implementation of the improvement of the system was the responsibility of the team.

Nobody in that sentence does anything. Three actions (implement, improve, be responsible) have all been turned into furniture. In plain English: The team was responsible for improving the system - or better, The team improved the system.

Running the machine in reverse

For speech, and for any writing that wants to be read once and understood, learn to undo nominalisation on sight. The test: if the noun ends in -tion, -ment, -ance or -al, and the verb beside it is make, have, give, take or reach, try the plain verb.

Undoing the noun forces a second, healthy question: who is doing this? The verb needs a subject, so the hidden actor has to come back. That is exactly why officials prefer the noun, and exactly why your reader prefers the verb.

Keep the noun when the event itself is your topic (The decision was unpopular), when the actor genuinely does not matter (the arrival of spring), or when you are writing in a register that expects it. Drop it when a plain verb says the same thing in fewer words, which in speech is nearly always.

Common mistakes

Ranked by how often learners actually make them.

1. Inventing the form. Destroyment, arrivation, refusement - the machine does not take requests. Each verb's noun is fixed and has to be learned with the verb.
2. The wrong weak verb. You make a decision, not do or take one (in British English); you have a discussion, not make one. The pairings are collocations, not grammar, and dictionaries list them.
3. The missing article. We made decision fails at articles, because decision is a countable noun: we made a decision. The abstract look of these nouns tricks learners into treating them all as uncountable.
4. Chains of of. The implementation of the improvement of the system - two nominalisations joined by of is a sign to stop and find the verbs again. One of is normal; two is a warning; three is a hostage note.
5. Nominalising your speech. I gave him an explanation of my refusal sounds like a witness statement. In conversation: I explained why I said no. Register matters more than correctness here.
6. Confusing the -ing form with the noun. Arriving and arrival can both act as nouns, but they are not interchangeable: the arriving of the train is wrong, and the difference between gerund and derived noun is covered in gerund and infinitive.

Practice

Rewrite each sentence with a plain verb instead of the noun. Answers are below.

1. They reached an agreement about the price.
2. She gave a clear explanation of the rules.
3. The committee made a decision to wait.
4. We had a long discussion about the garden.
5. His refusal of the offer was a surprise to everybody.

Answers: 1. They agreed about the price. 2. She explained the rules clearly. 3. The committee decided to wait. 4. We discussed the garden for a long time. 5. He refused the offer, which surprised everybody (undoing one noun exposed the second: surprise was hiding too).

Nominalisation is one of two great actor-hiding devices in English; the other is the passive voice, and formal prose usually runs both at once. For the borderline between -ing forms and true nouns, see gerund and infinitive, and for the small words these heavy nouns still cannot escape, see articles.