Page 289 - Writing Winning Business Proposals

280 Appendix E

Change Nouns into Verbs?

The original sentence that follows contains an abstract noun in the subject slot;
in the revised sentence, I’ve corrected that problem and improved the sentence
further by changing nouns into verbs:

Original: The understanding of design can be helpful in the construction of attrac-
tive buildings.
Revised: By understanding design, you can construct attractive buildings.

Some words like understanding are spelled the same in their noun and verb
forms, and the vast majority of words ending in -tion, -sion, and -ment have verb
or -ing verb forms. Construction can be construct or constructing. Dissension can
be dissent or dissenting. Development can be develop or developing. Note what
happened when I changed the nouns to verbs in the preceding sentences: I could
delete the article (the) before the noun as well as the preposition (of) that fol-
lows. “The understanding of” becomes “understanding”; “the construction of”
becomes “construct.” My revision contains fewer words, and the sentence is less
noun heavy, less formal, and more active.

Prefer the Active Voice?

In an active voice sentence, the subject does the acting: “John hit the ball.” In a
passive voice sentence, the subject is acted upon, i.e., passive: “The ball was hit
by John.” Note that in this instance, the passive sentence takes 50 percent more
words to express the same basic idea. If conciseness is your overriding objective,
you ought to prefer the active voice.
Of course, we can reduce the second sentence by two words if we eliminate
“by John.” This construction is sometimes called the anonymous passive because
nothing in the sentence explains who (or what) acted. If avoiding blame or attri-
bution is your overriding objective, you ought to prefer the anonymous passive.
In some situations, that is, you might prefer “A poor decision was made” to “The
CEO screwed up.”
As with everything else in writing, your decisions ought to be defined by the
situation, by your strategy, by your analysis of your intended readers or listen-
ers and their relationship to you. You and those readers or listeners exist in a
context. By the way, if that context happens to be a scientific one and you are
writing within a scientific culture, then you will likely be using the passive voice
quite often, simply because that’s the way things are done, that’s how writers are
expected to write and how readers expect to read.