A panoply of teaching resources.
The purpose of this writing session is to improve your English writing skills by learning how to paraphrase authoritative sources that support an argument.
By the end of this session, students will be able to:
Nominalization means changing a word into a noun. Nominalization usually involves changing verbs to nouns though adjectives (e.g. careless to carelessness) and adverbs (e.g. wordy to wordiness) can nominalized as well.
Nominalization is commonly used in academic textbooks, legal documents and professional or government reports. Its effect is to emphasize the action by adding punch to the end of the sentence (e.g. chemical fertilizers accelerate plant growth). It also creates a noun concept which can be operationalized and classified (e.g. fatal becomes fatalities).
Some critics don’t like nominalization because it creates wordy sentences. In other words, some writing critics harbor no fear regarding their expression of dislike of wordiness.
Here are some examples of nominalization:
This writing lesson for ESL students is about learning how to write a sentence.
Last week, my students wrote a paragraph using a brainstorming technique, which is here. Some of the stories were quite good. The main problem was awkward sentences.
This is Lesson 6 of the Paraphrase Writing e-course, the final activity in this e-course. In this lesson, you will paraphrase sentences by removing words and replacing them with their definitions. Here is an example.