To help German speakers adjust their default settings in English, I dramatically emphasize verbal style because it is the best choice for most professional writing. That said, there is indeed a place for nominal style, which I'll show you here.
Forget the cliché about "painting a picture in the reader's mind." A movie is the right metaphor. Vivid writing stimulates a sequence of scenes in the reader's mind—a "motion picture," as they used to say. This movie feeling comes through using lots of character subjects and action verbs.
When you watch a film, you can easily name the main characters. When you read a well-written text, it should be just as easy to name the main people or things that the text is about. They are the characters, protagonists, agents, doers—call them what you like—and they should become the grammatical subjects of your sentences.
If you were paying attention in your high school German class, you may remember hearing about Nominalstil. And if your teachers were especially traditional, they might have emphatically told you that nominal style = sophistication. For those who daydreamed through that lesson, let me jog your memory with an example:
To write well in English, German speakers should start by switching off about half of their brain’s RAM. It’s as if their language brings them into adulthood with 8 gigs, while we English speakers have only 4. That’s the only way to explain how German speakers read sentences like this every day without having their brain short-circuit:
