How avoiding turning your verbs into nouns makes your writing better

Today I want to talk about a habit of lots of academics: turning their verbs into nouns. This a habit that makes your writing windier. Like a vine meandering its way up.

Verbs change into nouns when you place them in front of “has been”, “should be”, or variations thereof. Often this is not needed, still scientist do this a lot. Just think about how many times you came across the phrase “it has been shown in the literature that …”.

My guess is that there are three reasons for this.

1. Blindly copying how other scientists write articles. Seeing it as part of how academic articles are written. Though you don’t need to turn your verbs into nouns for your writing to be considered academic or scientific. Its does however forces the reader to take the long way around to what you want to bring across.
2. Uncertainty and insecurity by the writer about what they are saying. I see where those are coming from, but a simple “might” or “suggests” does the trick. These are words that you use to indicate that you are not 100% sure if your reasoning is correct. As for those uncertainties that come with measuring things, statistics is your friend.
3. Not sure what the correct tense of a particular verb. As a non-native English speaker, I have been there. The tenses of English verbs are tricky for lots of non-native English speakers as they expect the verb to slightly change form, which in English it often does not. So, by slapping “has been” in front of a verb we make sure that the reader knows that we are speaking in the past tense. But nowadays this is no longer an excuse of not using the verb properly. Because if you are unsure of how it changes, just ask Google or another search engine for the correct form of the verb, they are happy to supply it to you.

Now let’s unpack that uncertainty and ambiguity that comes along with slapping phrases such as “has been” in front of your verb. Take the above-mentioned phrase:

“it has been shown in the literature that …”

That “has been” not only indicates that this action took place in the past, but also that it might continue in the present, it also might just be completed. In the case of something shown in the literature we can assume that it is still in the literature, unless it is retracted. That last part if likely not applicable, unless explicitly stated. Therefore we can easily replace it with:

“the literature shows …”

You not only make your writing more direct and easier to read but also avoid all possible uncertainties and ambiguities.

This not only counts for this particular phrase but for all phrases in which verbs are turned into nouns. That is not to say that you should not use the verbs “to be” or “to have” at all. More that you need to be aware when you use them that they are not stand ins for the verb-turned-noun that comes next.

So, by avoiding turning our verbs into nouns we write more like the tree that the vine is meandering around,

Prompt

To become aware of how often you rely on the “has been” or similar stand ins for the tense of your verb I like you to set the timer at 10 minutes and write about your project, why you do it, a bit of your latest results and what they mean. Now during this writing don’t pay to much attention to how you write it down. But after those 10 minutes are up, I like you to go over your text and circle every “has been” type phrase. Then go and rewrite it without the “has been” or alternative stand in.

Happy writing