Nominalization is turning a verb into its noun form and pairing it with a generic verb like "make," "do," "have," or "conduct." "Decide" becomes "make a decision." "Discover" becomes "make a discovery." "Investigate" becomes "conduct an investigation." Grammatically, none of this is wrong — but it quietly drains energy out of a sentence.
The action of the sentence is supposed to live in the verb. When you nominalize, the real action gets buried inside a noun, and the verb slot gets filled with something generic that isn't doing much work — "conducted," "made," "had." The sentence ends up longer, with the actual meaning one step removed from where a reader expects to find it.
Look for nouns ending in -tion, -ment, -ance, -al, or -ing that are paired with a weak verb (make, do, have, conduct, perform, give). If you can replace the noun-plus-weak-verb pair with a single strong verb, you're looking at a nominalization worth fixing.
It's genuinely useful when you need to talk about the action as a thing in its own right — as a topic, subject, or noun phrase, rather than as something someone is actively doing.
It's also common and expected in academic and legal writing, where a more formal, noun-heavy register is the convention. The issue is mainly in writing meant to be direct and easy to follow — reports, emails, instructions — where nominalization adds length without adding clarity.
When you catch a "make/do/have/conduct + noun" pattern, try converting the noun back into its verb form and see if the sentence gets shorter and more direct. Usually it will.
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