Here are two sentences that say the same thing.
The implementation of the new policy resulted in an improvement in customer satisfaction.
When we implemented the new policy, customers became more satisfied.
The first sentence is longer, harder to read, and sounds more important. The second is shorter, clearer, and sounds like a person wrote it. The difference is four nominalisations: implementation, improvement, satisfaction, and the "resulted in" that holds them together like a bad hinge.
A nominalisation is a verb or an adjective that has been turned into a noun. Implement becomes implementation. Improve becomes improvement. Decide becomes decision. Analyse becomes analysis. The grammar is fine. The prose is not.
Why they appear
Nobody writes "the implementation of" because they think it is clearer. They write it because it sounds more formal, and formal sounds more authoritative, especially in academic and corporate settings.
There is a real reason the habit spreads. Nominalisations let you leave out the actor. "We implemented the policy badly" names someone. "The implementation of the policy was suboptimal" does not. For anyone writing about a failure, the passive abstraction is useful, and once it is useful it becomes a habit, and once it is a habit it appears in sentences where nobody needed hiding.
The result is prose with no people in it, where actions have become things and things happen to other things.
How to spot them
The endings are the tell. Most nominalisations end in one of these suffixes.
-tion, -sion: implementation, decision, discussion -ment: improvement, development, management -ance, -ence: performance, compliance, dependence -ity: productivity, quality, complexity -ness: effectiveness, readiness, awareness -ism: criticism, professionalism
Not every noun ending this way is a problem. "Information," "station," and "decision" often have no verb alternative that reads better. The test is whether there is a verb underneath, and whether removing the noun makes the sentence shorter and clearer.
A quick diagnostic: count the nouns in a sentence that end in -tion or -ment. If there are two or more, and the sentence has no human subject, you are probably looking at fog.
Getting the verb back
The repair is mechanical. Find the noun, find the verb hiding inside it, and rebuild the sentence around the verb.
The committee made a decision to postpone the evaluation of the proposal.
The committee decided to postpone evaluating the proposal.
Two nominalisations gone, six words gone, and the sentence now has an actor doing a thing.
Sometimes the verb needs a subject that was never stated. "An investigation of the incident was conducted" becomes "We investigated the incident" — and the writer has to decide whether "we" is accurate. That decision is often the real work, and the nominalisation was avoiding it.
The academic exception
Academic writing has a genuine need for some abstraction. Concepts need names, and a term like "globalisation" or "socialisation" carries a meaning that a verb phrase cannot always reproduce. The problem is not abstraction itself; it is unnecessary abstraction.
The useful distinction is between a term of art and a decoration. A term of art is used consistently, defined once, and refers to something the field has agreed on. A decoration is a verb that has been dressed up because the writer thought it sounded better.
A useful habit for academic writers: allow nominalisations in the places where the concept is the subject of the sentence, and use verbs everywhere else. "Globalisation has increased inequality" is fine. "The globalisation of markets has resulted in an increase in inequality" is the same claim with two extra layers.
What the numbers say
Readability formulas are sensitive to this. Long words and long sentences both lower a readability score, and nominalisations produce both: they are longer than the verbs they replace and they tend to require more prepositions to connect.
That is why a draft can pass a grammar check and still score badly on readability. Nothing is ungrammatical. The prose is simply working harder than it needs to.
Run a paragraph through the readability checker, then rewrite it with verbs and run it again. The score usually improves, and the meaning usually gets sharper at the same time.
A revision routine
You do not need to hunt every nominalisation. Target the ones that do the most damage.
Look at sentence subjects. If the subject is an abstract noun — "the implementation," "the analysis," "the decision" — ask who did it. Put that person or group in the subject position.
Look at the verb "to be" plus a nominalisation. "Was in agreement" becomes "agreed." "Is in possession of" becomes "has." "Made an arrangement" becomes "arranged."
Look at prepositions. Chains of "of" usually mark a sentence built out of nouns: "the reduction of the cost of production of the unit." Find the verb and rebuild.
Leave the terms of art alone. If a word is defined in the document and used consistently, it is doing a job.
The result
The point is not that short words are better than long ones. It is that verbs carry action and nouns carry categories, and a sentence built entirely from categories has no action in it. Readers follow action. They wade through categories.
The next time a paragraph feels heavy without being wrong, count the nouns ending in -tion. The number will usually tell you where the weight is coming from.