“I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.”
Three out of the four nouns in this famous sentence penned by Winston Churchill are concrete nouns.
That’s probably why it’s a famous sentence. It packs a powerful sensory punch.
Blood is red, warm and threatening. Tears drip clear, wet and salty. Sweat is also salty and sticky when it dries on our limbs.
In fact, we feel all three of these words on our skin.
But toil? Toil is weaker than the other three nouns, weaker than it’s strapping brothers in Churchill’s renowned sentence. We don’t know exactly what toil looks like, or how it tastes, smells or feels on the skin. It’s abstract.
Abstract nouns, like toil or denuclearization are blunt instruments, the Ambien of public speaking, and often the the dullest knife in the drawer of political rhetoric. The French are the worst. Jacques Chirac squeezed 13 abstract nouns—unity, liberty, humanity and more—into a single sentence.
Such sentences are called “nominalized” sentences because the author of the sentence has forced abstract nouns to perform most of the work. And they are not good, productive workers.
Don’t nominalize. Make your verbs do the work.
Consider this sentence: “This essay gives an analysis of the pollution problem and offers a solution.”
The abstract nouns “analysis” and “solution” convey most of the meaning of the sentence, while the verbs “gives” and “offers” are practically meaningless.
So let’s fix this sentence. “This essay analyzes and solves the pollution problem.”
See what I mean? It’s shorter and more direct, and it allows the verbs to do the work. Verbs are the worker bees in the hive of language. They move things along.
Nominalized sentences may be grammatically and factually correct, but they are vague. Finding meaning in them is like hunting through fog to sculpt smoke. Most humans learn best when they can listen to a speaker and picture specific, vivid mental images—and verbs are more vivid than nouns.
Banning abstract nouns from public speeches, despite the restrictions it would impose, would improve most of the 30 million PowerPoint presentations made each day.
The aim of all writing and public speaking, according to Robert Louis Stevenson, is to affect your audience precisely as you wish.
This is equally true for written and spoken English.
Precisely is the key. The concrete noun is a precision tool, and the abstract noun is a blunt instrument.
Rid yourself of abstract nouns, the worm that is eating your eloquence.