Page 286 - Writing Winning Business Proposals

A Few Comments About Writing Effective Sentences (and Paragraphs) 277

The italicized words are the grammatical subjects in the sentences, and each word
is what I call an abstract noun. Now, it’s true that, given certain contexts, some of
these words could be considered concrete rather than abstract. For example, if the
paragraph or document containing sentence 2 were about regulations, then the
word regulations would be concrete within that context. Or, for example, if you were
writing part of a methods section, the word methods would be concrete in that con-
text. Generally speaking, however, concrete nouns are people and places (including
organizations like businesses), not things. Each subject in the preceding sentences is
a thing. What’s wrong with placing “things” (i.e., abstract nouns) in the subject slot?
Abstract subjects tend to increase the distance between the subject and verb, mak-
ing the text more difficult to comprehend and remember. When you read, you don’t
process text letter by letter or word by word. If you did, you’d have considerable dif-
ficulty remembering the content even of short sentences. Instead, you process text in
chunks like phrases and clauses. Because a clause is a group of words with a subject
and a predicate, you can’t process the clause until you get to the verb. When a sen-
tence begins with a subject and takes a long time to get to the verb, the reader has to
keep a great deal of information in short-term memory until the clause is complete.
Abstract subjects tend to increase the distance between subject and verb
because you have to explain the abstraction. Take the abstract noun shortage in
sentence 3. Because it’s an abstraction, you have to concretize it, you have to tell
the reader what kind of shortage it is, before you can explain what it does. That
requires the prepositional phrase of support staff that separates noun and verb.
Just one prepositional phrase isn’t bad. But an abstract subject is often responsible
for more difficult-to-read sentences, like this one:

The urgent request for all employees of our company to submit their time
sheets at the same time is being made so that the Accounting Department
can more efficiently do its work.

In this case, the writer’s answer to the question “what kind of request?” takes
three prepositional phrases and 15 words.
The previous example illustrates another problem with abstract nouns as sub-
jects: they tend to take passive verbs (e.g., “is being made”), because abstractions
can’t act. The effect is lifeless prose, because the sentence’s most important slots
(subject and predicate) are filled with a noun that can’t take action and a verb
that can’t express action.
Eliminating abstract nouns is fairly easy. And once you get the hang of it, you
won’t write many of them even in an initial draft. Here’s what to do:

◉ Look carefully at the subject slot to see if it contains, not a person or an organi-
zation, but a thing.