The Zombie Noun Walk

Transcript of Helen Sword’s podcast episode The Zombie Noun Walk

Hi, I'm Helen Sword from helensword.com and this is Swordswings, my podcast series for writers in motion. So whether you're out walking or in a car, or on a train or a bus or just pottering around your kitchen, this recording will help you move yourself and your writing forward to someplace new. Today I'm talking about zombies. No, not the ones you find in horror movies. We're talking about zombie nouns. I was tempted to call it the zombie walk, but I don't watch horror movies myself, so I don't actually know a whole lot about zombie lore, as I will explain a bit more later. But I did want to tell you the story of how I took a really nerdy grammatical concept, an entity known as the nominalization, which is a noun that's been formed from other parts of speech. It's been nominalized. I took that concept, which I can barely even pronounce without stumbling over it, and transformed it into a social media superstar. All right, I haven't quite reached Taylor Swift numbers, but my zombie nouns video has had over a million views on YouTube, which is a lot for an academic anything. It's certainly a lot for a little piece about grammar. I didn't anticipate when I first put zombie nouns out into the world that the phrase would enter the lexicon and that I would end up with this video that so many people have seen and people tell me they've watched it in their high school classes. I don't know, it's a term people remember. I want to tell the backstory of how that came about, how I came to call nominalizations ‘zombie nouns’ and what happened when I did so. I had a dream about zombies? No, not quite, but what happened was I wrote my book Stylish Academic Writing, which is all about ways that academic writers can liven up their language, can use stories, metaphors, humor, personal narratives, even poetic ways of thinking and writing.

All of those things can be integrated into conventional academic writing, and the book is filled with examples of writers who have done that and been praised for it. In some cases, it's made their reputation. So the book is there to encourage and empower academic writers to write more stylishly, which is what I always tell people. If you don't like the word stylish, just replace it with engaging. How can you write more engagingly, more memorably, in a way that will help your research, whatever it is you're writing about, have more impact, and there are various chapters on using stories, using metaphors, using a personal voice. It's a very skills-based book, filled with examples and practical suggestions for how to implement these strategies so that you can become like your favorite writers and write as engagingly as they do. And there's a whole chapter that's about what I call ‘smart sentencing’— basically just how to write strong, compelling sentences.

A lot of that chapter was based on my previous book, the Writer's Diet, which is really just about sentence-level writing. There's a chapter on verbs, a chapter on nouns, and if you listened to my Swordswing podcast called ‘the Wordcraft Walk’, it's really all about the power of nouns and verbs to animate your writing and to engage your reader. The power of concrete language, which mostly resides in the nouns, though also in the verbs to some extent, and the power of action verbs, dynamic verbs, where something's happening. So, just as in a story, we generally have protagonists, characters who then move through the world, just as you right now are in a body that is moving through the world as you listen to this, or at least existing in space. So our sentences need to move our listeners through the world. They need to have legs, and we do that with the concrete nouns, the dynamic verbs and real life examples.

So I published this book with Harvard University Press, and they had this great publicist who was really, really proactive about putting the book out into the world. And she came back to me by email and said I've been in touch with the New York Times. They have this blog on writing. It's very popular and they'd like you to pitch a piece on any aspect of style that you want to talk about. And I said, gosh, what do I write about? Well, one of the key points that I'm making over and over again, and I've continued to make ever since that book was published, is the power of concrete language and particularly the ways in which these nouns, called nominalizations, kind of lock up action. They're formed from other parts of speech, so they almost always have a verb inside them or an adjective. And when you start to realize that capability has swallowed up capable or that anticipation has swallowed up anticipate, you start to notice how the nominalizations are almost preventing the more active descriptive words from doing their best work in the sentences. Instead you're ending up with these lumbering, academic-y sounding words that don't really take the sentence anywhere new because they're so abstract, and then they're often paired with quite bland verbs as well—Is, are, was, all those be-verbs.

So I knew I wanted to write about nominalizations, but I can barely even pronounce that word without stumbling over it. It's so boring. Who's going to possibly want to read something about nominalizations? I thought. Well, I figured I had to follow my own advice. I had to attach it to concrete examples; concrete examples of how you might release the energy in those nominalizations and rewrite the sentences. But I felt like I needed something you could visualize, almost like a character or something. And I was struggling with it, thinking about it, and then I had a dream. I really did. I woke up in the morning and I'd had this dream that the nominalization had become this sort of entity or that I was writing about this kind of monster or this creature called the nominalization. And I was going to tell the story of how this creature ate up the other parts of speech and got more and more distended and couldn't really move anywhere. And that was going to be my story. But I needed a name for it. Monster didn't quite work, it was sort of a Frankenstein-y thing. So that story didn't fit.

And we happened to have one of my kids' university friends visiting us from out of town. We took her on a drive, a long drive for a couple of hours around Auckland, New Zealand, where I live. We're sort of rolling through the countryside. I can still almost see the scenery because that's the power of the physical world and the visual imagination in our minds. You know, often you can remember the place where you were sitting when you read a particular passage or when you heard a piece of news. We were driving along and I was explaining how I needed to write this article for the New York Times, and I'd had this dream, and I was trying to describe this sort of creature. And this visiting student said ah, I've just been reading Donna Haraway about cyborgs and it sounds to me a bit like a cyborg. And if you know Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto, a cyborg is a creature that's part human, part machine. A lot of people have theorized about cyborgs and I think a lot of the anxiety these days about artificial intelligence, for example in writing or anyplace else, is very much linked to our anxiety about any machine that seems too human. It's a phenomenon sometimes called the uncanny valley, where we want our robots to actually look like robots. We don't want them too human.

Of course, with nominalizations, it was a bit of a different issue. I wasn't talking about a combination of a human and machine, so that didn't quite work. But I mulled it over and then I just suddenly went Zombies! and I think it helps that in American English nominalization has that Z or Zed, (in the English spelling it's an S) that zation zombie. It immediately made sense and I just went oh yeah, it's the zombies. And then, as I worked on the metaphor, oh yeah, they swallow the living. You know, they're the undead, it's hard to kill them off, they just sort of lumber around. As I said, I don't watch zombie movies and people have told me that in fact zombies are really, really scary and they can move really really fast. But I didn't know that. So I had the image of these slow, lumbering zombies and I went from there.

I wrote this little article. This little piece made it quite humorous. I called it Zombie Nouns. The New York Times titled it Nominalizations are Zombie Nouns, or something like that. But it immediately went viral. I remember on the day that it was published it was just on their blog, not in print, but it was the number two most forwarded article in the New York Times that day. It was tweeted by Susan Orland, so it just kind of went out there, and it had, I think, 700 comments in the first 24 hours and all that sort of thing.

Well, let me tell you a little more of the story. So it got out there, I immediately started getting requests to have it reproduced. It reproduced in textbooks and on other websites, things like that, and a few months after it was published (this was back in July 2012), I heard from the people at TED-Ed. So you're probably familiar with TED Talks. Ted-ed was sort of an offspring of TED, which was creating these short little animated videos to be used in education, and there's some wonderful ones on the TED-Ed website, along with all kinds of supplementary material for teachers and things. So they contacted me and they said “loved your article, we'd like to turn it into an animated TED-Ed video. We'll either get somebody to read it or you could read it yourself, record it yourself, and then we'll get somebody to do sound effects and animation.”

So you can find this on YouTube. Just Google “Helen Sword zombie nouns” it should jump right up. You can find it on the TED-Ed website. I'm going to play it for you. It's just a few minutes long and you get the sound effects, but of course you're not getting the visuals. So if you haven't seen the zombie noun video, you might try to imagine what some of those visuals are. If you have seen it, try to picture it as you go along. I've probably watched that video 100 times and I still don't get tired of it. I find it quite charming. So here we go, my zombie nouns article from the New York Times.

Take an adjective such as implacable, or a verb like proliferate, or even another noun, crony, and add a suffix such as ity or tion or ism. You've created a new noun. Implacability, proliferation, cronyism. Sounds impressive, right? Wrong! You've just unleashed a flesh-eating zombie.

Nouns made from other parts of speech are called nominalizations. Academics love them. So do lawyers, bureaucrats, business writers. I call them zombie nouns because they consume the living, they cannibalize active verbs, they suck the lifeblood from adjectives, and they substitute abstract entities for human beings. Here's an example.

The proliferation of nominalizations in a discursive formation may be an indication of a tendency toward pomposity and abstraction.

Huh? This sentence contains no fewer than seven nominalizations, yet it fails to tell us who is doing what. When we eliminate or reanimate most of the zombie nouns—so tendency becomes tend, abstraction becomes abstract—then we add a human subject and some active verbs, the sentence springs back to life. Writers who overload their sentences with nominalizations tend to sound pompous and abstract. Only one zombie noun, the keyword nominalizations, has been allowed to remain standing. At their best, nominalizations help us express complex ideas, perception, intelligence, epistemology. At their worst, they impede clear communication. To get a feeling for how zombie nouns work, release a few of them into a lively sentence and watch them sap all its energy.

George Orwell played this game in his essay Politics and the English Language. He started with a well-known verse from the book of Ecclesiastes. In the Bible it says:
I returned and saw under the sun that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill, but time and chance happeneth to them all. Now here's Orwell's modern English version:
Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

The Bible passage speaks to our senses and emotions, with concrete nouns, descriptions of people and punchy abstract nouns such as race, battle, riches, time, chance, not a zombie among them. Orwell's satirical translation, on the other hand, is teeming with nominalizations and other vague abstractions. The zombies have taken over and the humans have fled the village. Zombie nouns do their worst damage when they gather in jargon-generating packs and swallow every noun, verb and adjective in sight. So globe becomes global, becomes globalized, becomes globalization. The grandfather of all nominalizations, anti-disestablishmentarianism, contains at least two verbs, three adjectives and six other nouns inside its distended belly. A paragraph heavily populated by nominalizations will send your readers straight to sleep. Rescue them from the zombie apocalypse with vigorous, verb-driven sentences that are concrete and clearly structured. You want your sentences to live, not to join the living dead.

So once the zombie nouns video was on YouTube, it really took off, although most of the citations in books and articles about zombie nouns using that phrase have referred back to the New York Times article. The phrase ‘Zombie Nouns’ is used by Steven Pinker in his book The Sense of Style. It's used by Sir Harold Evans in his book Do I Make Myself Clear? I think one of my favorite articles or publications is one called Army Writing and the Zombie Noun Apocalypse by Trent Lithgow. He uses the phrase ‘Zombie Nouns’ and credits me, and then he actually does an analysis of some army writing and shows a high incidence of zombie nouns, as you can imagine. And he makes an argument that by killing them off well, he says, happily, verb-eating zombie nouns are far easier to kill than their cinematic namesakes. Just use verbs. Instead of implementing a restructuring of combat formations, just restructure them. Don't improve the retention of soldiers, simply retain them. Rather than making use of all combat power, just use it.

And you see, he's moved beyond the zombie nouns, the nominalizations, to the more general issue of just adding a lot of abstract nouns, which then keep us from using those more active, dynamic verbs. So yeah, the zombie nouns have gone on to have a bit of a life of their own. Probably the most frequent comment on the YouTube video, which has had many, many comments, is those aren't zombies, they're skeletons. So I guess the guy doing the animation didn't know any more about zombies than I do, but they're very charming skeletons, and I love the way they sort of fall down and come back to life. They're very fun. Of course, the animation really brings the whole concept of the zombie dance together, to life, as do the sound effects.

But the point, in a way, was to use the metaphor. Use the story of the zombie nouns coming and taking over the village and the humans have to flee in the zombie noun apocalypse. Use that story in print so people have something to visualize. And so you see that the whole point that I'm making with zombie nouns is that they're abstract, they're hard to say, they're long, they're unwieldy, and the way we help our readers understand those difficult or sometimes just very abstract concepts is by attaching a story, by giving real-life examples. And that's exactly what I did with nominalizations. I gave them a name: zombie nouns. I gave you something you could visualize. I gave you a story, a little bit of a plot, and then I also gave you examples of texts that use a lot of zombie nouns and how they can be reanimated by getting rid of the zombies and releasing that kind of verbal energy.

So if you listen to my Wordcraft Swordswing, I use there the story of Martin Luther King in his I have a Dream speech. How he started out with quite an abstract kind of speech, in parts written by a committee. Here's one of his sentences that he never actually read out: “And so today, let us go back to our communities as members of the International Association for the Advancement of Creative Dissatisfaction.” You hear all those zombies—community, association, advancement, dissatisfaction. And he could hear, I think, as he was speaking, that the zombies were taking over. And that's when he put down his script and he moved into that concrete language of that part of the dream speech where he's talking about his own children. He's talking about the dream that on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of the former slaves and the sons of the former slave owners will be able to sit down at the table of brotherhood. He takes that really abstract concept of ‘brotherhood’, saves it for the end of the sentence, having first told us, given us an image of the two brothers sitting down or the two enemies sitting down together at a table. So he's given us a concrete image and he's given us a story. That's exactly what I did with nominalizations. I gave you a concrete image of zombie lands, something you can remember, and I gave you a story to attach them to. So here's what I want you to try. If you're out and about walking around or just making something in the kitchen, or whatever it is that you do when you're listening to these audios, I would like you to just think for a minute about some zombie noun that you use in your writing, in your discipline.

A colleague just wrote to me (somebody who's doing my WordCraft Catalyst, where we spent a whole week looking at zombie nouns), and she wrote “zombie nouns are a challenge in my field of education. It's much easier to create an image of someone educating than an image of education.” So think about whatever zombie noun there is in your discipline, and they're bound to be some like globalization or intersectionality. And what would be the concrete image that you could show to a reader to illustrate that concept? What would be the person or the people, what would be the scene, what would be happening? What's the equivalent of Martin Luther King's sons of former slaves and sons of former slave owners sitting together at the table for the term globalization?

I love the fact that the word globe is inside it. Not all zombie nouns have swallowed other nouns, but that one has Globe, global, globalized, globalization. Globe is quite an old English word and it's something we really can visualize, this round object. So how might you use, for example, an image of a globe to help your readers see what globalization is? And when I say using that image, it is fine to make a diagram or an illustration, but really, ideally, we want to find ways of doing this just with words because that's what writing has to do. That's the challenge.

Or ‘intersectionality’. I see lots of diagrams, sort of Venn diagrams, of intersectionality. But a story, a story of the ways in which somebody who's poor and who's also from an ethnic minority and who also has a learning disability and who also has, you know, all those different things, how the intersections of those different issues all ratchet up into a more difficult existence than any of those individual circumstances might make possible.

So if you can liberate the verbs and the adjectives or even the nouns from your nominalizations, you'll find things coming to life.

I want to end with a little piece of poetry. This is from Shakespeare, from A Midsummer Night's Dream,

The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling doth, glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, and as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet's pen turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.

Well, it's not just poets who do that, it's scholars, academics, anybody dealing with zombie nouns, with nominalizations, with abstract entities needs to find ways to turn them to shapes and give to that airy nothing a local habitation, a name, a story to embody them in a way that your readers will remember.

So by now I hope that you've moved your body someplace new since we started. Remember, you can find all of my Swordswing podcasts in the audio section of the right space membership area. That's my online members only resource site at helensword.com/writespace. Thanks for showing up to talk and think about writing with me and I look forward to walking with you again soon.