lexicon.excessive-nominalization
What it flags
Sentences densely packed with nominalizations — verbs turned into abstract nouns. Two problems compound: nominalized text is more abstract (costlier to process) and hides the agent (“who does what” is obscured). FALC and the US Plain Writing Act both recommend strong verbs over nominalizations.
At a glance
| Category | lexicon |
| Default severity | warning |
| Default weight | 1 |
| Languages | EN · FR (overlapping suffix lists) |
| Source | src/rules/excessive_nominalization.rs |
Detection
Walk the sentence. Flag words whose suffix matches the language’s nominalization list. Fire when the count per sentence crosses max_per_sentence.
- 🇫🇷 Suffixes:
-tion,-sion,-ment,-ance,-ence,-age,-ité,-isme,-ure - 🇬🇧 Suffixes:
-tion,-sion,-ment,-ance,-ence,-ity,-ism,-ness,-al
Parameters
| Key | Type | dev-doc | public | falc |
|---|---|---|---|---|
max_per_sentence | int | 4 | 3 | 2 |
suffixes | list | language defaults | language defaults | language defaults |
Known false positives
Technical vocabulary (function, implementation, configuration) contains many legitimate nominalizations, which is why dev-doc relaxes the threshold. The -al suffix in English is too broad (flags crucial, horizontal, positional despite these not being abstract nouns) and is tracked for review in F-excessive-nominalization-suffix-refine on the roadmap.
Example
Nominalizations colour-matched to their active-verb counterparts in the rewrite.
Before (heavy):
La réalisation de l’analyse de la conformité permettra l’identification des axes d’amélioration.
After (lighter):
Nous analyserons la conformité. Cela permettra d’identifier les axes à améliorer.
Suppression
References
See References for the full bibliography.