Nominalisation: Academic Writing
This worksheet moves from recognising nominalisation to producing it strategically. Three functional uses anchor the work. Shift focus from actor to action: The government decided to raise taxes → The government’s decision to raise taxes … Compress information: The system was implemented slowly and this caused problems → The slow implementation of the system caused problems. Connect ideas across sentences: The company expanded rapidly. This expansion put pressure on resources. The register awareness matters as much as the form: nominalisation transforms informal prose into appropriate academic style — but excessive nominalisation produces dense, unreadable text.
This worksheet drills C1 production of nominalisation in academic and professional contexts.
Worksheet preview
What’s inside:
- Grammar Box with the three functional uses (focus shift, compression, cross-sentence connection) and register-awareness criteria
- Rewriting: convert informal sentences into nominalised academic style across three functional categories
- Compression task: combine two related sentences into one using nominalisation
- Register awareness: identify over-nominalised text and rewrite it in cleaner, mixed style
- Full Answer Key plus Teacher Notes on the don’t-over-nominalise rule and the academic-writing-band criteria
Common mistakes addressed: over-nominalisation producing impenetrable prose (The implementation of the decision regarding the restructuring of the company…), missing or wrong determiners with the nominalised noun, and stacked nominalisations without verbs to break them up.
For: Adult and teenage learners (14+) at CEFR C1, in advanced classes, 1:1 lessons, or self-study. Active nominalisation is what separates band 4 from band 5 in Cambridge C1 Advanced (CAE) Writing — and is essential for any university-level academic writing in English. Part of the Advanced Grammar collection — the natural sibling is Nominalisation: Recognise and Decode, which builds the recognition foundation this worksheet activates in production.
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