Nominalization

In plain English

The action in your sentence gets packed into a noun, and because the sentence still needs a verb, an empty one is brought in to carry it.

That empty verb is the tell. Make, conduct, perform, undertake, give and carry out are doing grammatical work and no descriptive work at all.

A worked example

The same sentence with the verb buried, then dug out.

Buried:  The committee made a decision to postpone the review.
Dug out: The committee postponed the review.

Buried:  We carried out an investigation into the discrepancy.
Dug out: We investigated the discrepancy.

Fine as it stands:
         The decision was appealed six weeks later.

Nine words become five, and nothing is lost. The verb that carried the meaning was already there, hidden inside the noun.

The third example keeps the noun on purpose. The decision is genuinely the subject being talked about, so naming it as a thing is precise rather than evasive.

That is the whole judgement: is this noun the thing I am discussing, or is it a verb I flattened to avoid saying who did what?

Why it matters for AI detection

Nominalizations are the main reason institutional and academic prose reads as heavy without any individual sentence being wrong. Each one is invisible; the habit is not.

They also let you avoid naming an agent. "A decision was made" leaves out who decided, and that omission is sometimes accidental and sometimes not.

Detection is not the reason to fix them. No detector counts nominalizations, and rewriting for directness is worth doing because the writing improves, not because a score might move.

Commonly confused with

Passive voice

Both can hide who acted, and they often appear together, but they are different mechanisms. Passive voice rearranges the sentence; nominalization converts the verb into a noun. "A decision was made" does both at once.

Jargon

Jargon is specialised vocabulary a general reader will not know. A nominalization is usually made of ordinary words, which is why it slips past unnoticed.

Read next

• Nominalization finder
• Passive voice
• Readability checker