Day 67: Keep adjectives as adjectives, not as nouns.

In most cases, we want verbs to remain as verbs. We find nouns that come from verbs and change them back in to verbs. We also want adjectives to remain as adjectives. We find nouns that come from adjectives and change them back into adjectives. Consider this sentence.

“The difficulty will be convincing the committee members.”

Here, the noun “difficulty” comes from the adjective difficult. When we use the adjective form, a possible revision is

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“Convincing the committee members will be difficult.”

We prefer the revised version for a couple of reasons.

 
  1. The focus is now on the action, so the sentence is more engaging.
  2. In the original sentence, the term “difficulty” doesn’t have any meaning until you read the rest of the sentence.

Here’s another example to help clarify this concept.

“Their food was known for its awfulness.”

The bad noun is “awfulness,” which comes from the adjective awful. One revision using the adjective is

“Their food was awful.”

We are not as adamant about changing nouns back into adjectives as we are about changing nouns back into verbs. In many cases, a sentence using a nominalized adjective will be more concise.

Here’s our recommendation. Find nominalized adjectives and evaluate potential revisions. If the revised version is simpler, clearer, more direct, and more engaging, use the adjective form. Otherwise, use the noun form.