LinguisticDUAL-USE

Nominalization

What it is

Converting processes into abstract nouns, hiding who is doing what to whom and making dynamic situations seem fixed and unchangeable.

How it works

"The company made a decision to lay off workers" becomes "The layoff decision." Agency disappears. A process that involved specific people making specific choices becomes a thing — abstract, inevitable, and no one's fault. This linguistic trick makes human choices look like natural events beyond anyone's control.

Real-world examples

  • •"The restructuring" obscures that executives chose to fire people.
  • •"There has been a failure of communication" hides that specific people failed to communicate.
  • •"The situation in the region" conceals that specific actors created the situation through specific actions.

Ethical guidelines

Where the line is

Nominalizing to write concisely is ordinary style. It becomes manipulation when agency is removed in order to hide who did what — "mistakes were made", "the decision was taken", "shots were fired".

  • ●Language that hides agency prevents accountability.
  • ●When humans make choices that affect others, the language should reflect that human agency.
  • ●Nominalizations in official communications often serve to diffuse blame rather than to clarify.

How to defend against it

  • ►When you encounter an abstract noun, ask: "Who did what to whom?" Restore the hidden agent.
  • ►Challenge passive, agentless language in official statements: "Who made this decision?"
  • ►Be suspicious when dynamic situations are described as static things — someone is hiding the action.

From the Defense Playbook

Explain the Mechanismminutes

Before taking or accepting a strong position, try to explain step by step how the policy, product, or claim actually works, because the attempt reliably reveals that you understood less than you felt you did and deflates the confidence a persuader was counting on.

Every playbook entry states how strong its evidence is and when not to use it. Browse the full playbook.

References

  1. Fowler, R., Hodge, B., Kress, G., & Trew, T. (1979). Language and Control. Routledge & Kegan Paul
    The founding critical-linguistics account of the entry's mechanism: turning processes into nouns (and using passives) deletes the agent and the time of the action, so that decisions made by particular people are presented as things that simply exist.
  2. Fairclough, N. (1989). Language and Power. Longman
    The entry's claim that the device makes human choices look like natural, unchangeable events: Fairclough analyses nominalisation as a resource that obscures agency and causality in institutional and media texts, backgrounding who did what to whom.
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