In one activity in my advanced writing class, we talk about the 5 Main Weaknesses in Academic Writing: weak verbs, delayed verbs, nominalization (making verbs into nouns), incorrect parallel structure, and overuse of nouns in prepositional phrases that should be adjectives (I’ll explain that later).
Here’s an example I give with several nominalized verbs. Could you do the revision?
In this project, we made an examination of burnout in medical school to present a comparison to burnout rates in a hospital setting mid-career. After we completed our analysis, we discovered a high occurrence of burnout in first year medical students. As we came to this realization, we hoped our research would result in an improvement in stress-management young physicians.
Here, I highlight the nominalized verbs:
In this project, we made an examination of burnout in medical school to present a comparison to burnout rates in a hospital setting mid-career. After we completed our analysis, we discovered a high occurrence of burnout in first year medical students. As we came to this realization, we hoped our research would result in an improvement in stress-management in young physicians.
Here’s how students might condense this to create all strong verbs and make the nouns after prepositions adjectives (you’ll see what I mean). I underlined the fresh verbs.
We compared medical student burnout to mid-career hospital work burnout and found higher burnout rates in first-year medical students. We hope this research improves how schools help young physicians manage stress.
When you revise to find strong verbs, you’ll find your sentences increase in both clarity and brevity.
PS: Here’s what I mean by the “adjective nouns” or the overuse of nouns in prepositional phrases that could become describing words for other nouns. Like this:
burnout in medical school = medical school burnout
I love providing little grammar lessons throughout the semester!