Noun Groups

https://education.nsw.gov.au/teaching-and-learning/student-assessment/smart-teaching-strategies/literacy/language-conventions/noun-groups#Noun0

Nouns are words that name people, places, things, ideas and states of being. Certain nouns refer to things that are able to be counted for example, ten toys. Some nouns refer to uncountable things, for example, air, research, happiness, snow, hair, traffic and so on. There are different types of nouns:

• common nouns (the vast majority) are the names of classes of things and begin with a lower-case letter, for example, boy, girl, name, verb, biography, computer.

• proper nouns name specific people, places, things and acronyms and begin with a capital letter, for example, Cathy Freeman, Sydney Harbour, Olympic Games.

• abstract nouns name concepts or things that cannot be seen, for example, democracy, hate, joy, honesty, hypothesis.

• collective nouns name groups of things, for example, team, family, committee, flock, bunch.

• mass nouns name things that you cannot count, for example, gold, milk, sunshine, furniture, traffic, information.

Noun groups

A noun group is a group of words relating to, or building on, a noun. Too many noun groups make sentences hard to read and lumpy.

Noun groups usually consist of a pointer (the, a, an, this, that, these, those, my, your, his, her, its, our, mum‘s, Mr Smith’s) plus one or more adjectives or adverbs and are an important language resource for building up descriptions.

In factual texts, noun groups contain the ‘content’ across key learning areas. In literary texts they develop creative expression, important for building the story world, characterisation and imagery.

The dry, windswept, desert region has an extremely low level of rainfall. (Noun groups both before – pre-modifiers, and after the noun – post-modifier, need to be explored).

Noun groups can also have adjectival phrases or adjectival clauses embedded in them:

• the regions with low rainfalls are uninhabited. ('with low rainfalls' is an adjectival phrase).

• the regions which have higher rainfalls are inhabited. ('which have higher rainfalls' is an adjectival clause).

How to avoid noun phrases

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-avoid-noun-phrases-ann-wylie/

They suck the energy out of your copy

There’s nothing like noun phrases to make a tight sentence long, to transform clear, conversational language into stuffy bureaucratese:

“It is the intention of this team to facilitate the improvement of our company’s processes.”

Yet too many communicators write in noun phrases, not in verb phrases.

Why avoid noun phrases?

Noun phrases are groups of words where writers have turned verbs into nouns with latinized suffixes. Noun phrases:

1. Suck the energy out of your copy.

Noun phrases take perfectly strong verbs — verbs like “intend” and “improve” — and turn them into long nouns like “intention” and “improvement.” As a result, noun phrases suck the energy from a sentence, because only verbs can convey action.

That’s a problem, because the human brain thinks in action, not in things or ideas. Or so says Jon Franklin, author of Writing for Story and winner of two Pulitzer Prizes for feature stories:

“We habitually think of the brain, ours and the reader’s, as being the organ of thought and emotion. But when neuroanatomists examine its wiring, it turns out that it’s at least 95% or more devoted to movement. Human thoughts, all but the tiny minority of philosophical thoughts, are centered on action.”

Don’t turn action into persons, places, things or ideas.

2. Noun Phrases muddy your words.

Latinized nouns are almost always longer than the verbs they replace. Intention is three characters longer than intend; improvement, four characters longer than improve.

3. Lengthen your phrases.

It’s not just that noun phrases make single words longer. They also add to the length of sentences.

Noun phrases include the on one side of the nouned verb; of on the other: The improvement of. That makes a noun phrase two words longer than the original verb.

4. Bore your readers.

Noun phrases “aren’t visual and turn prose pallid,” writes science fiction author Nancy Kress. “Save them for interoffice memos.”

5. Make it seem as if you don’t understand.

As Joseph M. Williams writes in Style: Toward Clarity and Grace:

Novices to a field “predictably try to imitate those features of style that seem most prominently to bespeak membership, professional authority. And in complex professional prose, no feature of style is more typical than clumps of Latinate abstractions:

individualized assessment of the appropriateness of the death penalty…a moral inquiry into the culpability of the defendant.

New writers also “often slip into a style characterized by those same clumps of abstraction.”

Avoid these “clumps of abstraction.”

Search and destroy noun phrases

How do you get the action back into noun phrases?

“Exhume the action, make it a verb, and you’re almost certain to tighten and enliven the wording.”

— Claire Kehrwald Cook, author of Line by Line

To spot and repair these sloggy phrases:

1. Search for the word “of.”

That doesn’t mean that “of” is bad or is part of a noun phrase. But virtually every noun phrase uses the “the … of” construction (“the intention of” instead of “intend,” for example.) When you find an “of” …

2. Look to the end for a latinized suffix.

Suffixes like “tion,” “ment,” “ize” or “ility” turn verbs into nouns.

3. Turn noun phrases back into verbs.

When you find a noun phrase, recast it into a verb-powered sentence. “Our team plans to help improve our company’s processes,” for instance.

The result: Strong verbs that drive your copy — and sentences that are shorter, more energetic and easier to understand.

Write for readability.

Here are four more ways to make your writing clearer and shorter:

• Use Active voice: Don’t make your subject objects.

• Avoid adjective clauses: Hype just gets in the way.

• Steer clear of prepositional phrases: They’re hard to understand.

• Nail possessive pronouns: And other ways to write it right.