English Writing german speakers – Part 2
If you were paying attention in your high school German class, you may remember hearing about Nominalstil. And if your teachers were 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:
Apple’s gain in market share in the early 2000s was in large part the result of its channeling significant resources into the development of the iPhone.
This is nominal style because it comprises two long noun phrases—in blue above—joined by a measly “was” as the verb.
In the German-speaking context, your high school teacher was certainly right: nominal style pervades Amtssprache, Rechtssprache, and academic Fachsprachen. But the Anglo standard is different—even in our Amtsenglisch! If you don’t believe me, check out the official style recommendations of the UK government.
So, from California to Singapore to New Zealand, we English speakers would rather read this:
Apple gained market share in the early 2000s in large part because it channeled significant resources into developing the iPhone.
Here you can clearly see the jump from nominal to verbal style. The nouns “gain” and “channeling” transformed into the verbs “gained” and “channeled.” And with those vibrant verbs came the character subject “Apple.”
In my experience, most German speakers use nominal style as their default setting. A simple way to check your own English writing is to underline your grammatical subjects in every sentence of a paragraph. Then step back and ask yourself, "Am I regularly underlining long noun phrases or just one or two words?"
Let’s do this with a sample sentence from Part 1 of this series:
Understanding the difference between the funding requirements of start-ups as opposed to mature companies is indispensable business knowledge.
This is a clear specimen of nominal style. To make the shift to verbal style, try to figure out the main actions that are hidden within the massive noun phrase underlined here. You might notice that the nominalizations “understanding” and “requirements” are hiding the verbs “understand” and “require.” How could you rephrase this sentence using those verbs?
A successful entrepreneur understands that a company requires different funding sources as a start-up as opposed to a mature business.
Some object to this rewrite and say, “But you’ve changed the meaning of the sentence!” And my answer is, “Yes, you’re right. I’ve changed the meaning by making it more precise—and thus better!” When I shifted to verbal style, I had to choose human subjects to couple with the new verbs. I chose “A successful entrepreneur” for the first subject, but I could just as easily have written “A business manager must understand...” or “Smart investors understand…” Choose your subject based on whatever you want to say. Nominal style lets you fall into vague and imprecise wording. Verbal style forces you to make deliberate and specific choices about who is doing what.
So if you’d like make the shift from nominal to verbal style as you edit your work, follow these steps:
- Underline the grammatical subjects of your sentences.
- Are you underlining long noun phrases? If so, isolate the key nominalizations (nouns like “gain,” “channeling,” “understanding,” “requirements”).
- Turn one or two of these key nominalizations back into verbs.
- Find short, concrete subjects to match with those verbs.
Keep in mind that verbal style has been the English norm for centuries. It’s a pillar of my own writing bible and even a key ingredient of the “vigorous writing” taught in Strunk and White’s famous (or infamous) Elements of Style, written in 1911. In short, English prefers verbal style because it lets a reader clearly visualize who does what—the topic of next week’s post.
