Zombie nouns are verbs and adjectives that have been turned into nouns. They are standard in regulatory and legal writing, but they drain the life out of content written for patients and the public. In this blog, I explain how to spot them, when they are acceptable, and how to bring your plain language content back to life.
How do you Check if your Content is Infected?
Zombie nouns, as the writing scholar Helen Sword calls them, are nominalisations: verbs or adjectives that have been given a suffix and turned into nouns. Suffixes such as -ment, -ion, -ance, -ness, -ity and -ing are morphemes: the smallest units of language that carry meaning.
Extensive use of nominalisations is standard in some professional writing traditions, for example in regulatory medical writing, where objective and unbiased language is key to presenting scientific results. Or in legal writing, where nominalisations make the content more formal, as we see in recital 13 of the EU Clinical Trials Regulation:
“The assessment of the application for a clinical trial should address in particular the anticipated therapeutic and public health benefits (relevance) and the risk and inconvenience for the subject. In respect of the relevance, various aspects should be taken into account, including whether the clinical trial has been recommended or imposed by regulatory authorities in charge of the assessment of medicinal products and the authorisation of their placing on the market and whether surrogate end-points, when they are used, are justified.”
By turning perfectly sound verbs, such as “assess”, “apply” and “include”, into zombie nouns, the text becomes impersonal: the actor (the subject) of the sentence is left lingering on the page. The reader has to hold long chunks of text in memory to discover who the “doer” is. That is a problem when you write for readers who are not familiar with legal or scientific language. And many readers are not: in the OECD’s Survey of Adult Skills 2023, 26% of adults across OECD countries scored at the lowest literacy levels (Level 1 or below). And in a follow-up report from July 2026, the OECD warns that the share of adults with low foundational skills has grown over the past decade.
Bring Life Back to your Plain Language Content
Nominalisations are not wrong in themselves, and they can be useful, for example when the concept matters more than who did it. But when you write or rewrite technical content for a plain language audience, such as the general public or clinical study volunteers, avoid embalming your text in heavy noun phrases. Zombie nouns attract extra words, and you risk cooking exactly what you aim to avoid: alphabet soup!
If we replace the zombies (in bold) in the examples below with their verbs or adjectives, the sentences come back to life and are easier for the reader to digest.
In the rewrites, we removed the suffix from the zombie nouns (-ment from agreement) and replaced them with active verbs (agree).
The Language Gap and How to Close It
Plain language writing is different from academic or scientific writing. When you write in plain language, assume that your reader has no prior knowledge of the technical content. Everything should be in full view, so that the reader needs no help to see or understand it. This is especially important for one-way communication, where the text stands alone, without dialogue or other support.
Scientists and academics are trained in a writing style that works well among peers but is far from the simple, conversational language that most plain language information aims for. So they may struggle to present their content clearly to an outside reader.
In The Sense of Style (2014), Steven Pinker calls this language gap the curse of knowledge: “The problem is that as we become proficient at our job or hobby we come to use these catchwords so often that they flow out of our fingers automatically, and we forget that our readers may not be members of the clubhouse in which we learned them.”
More recent research points the same way. In Writing for Busy Readers (2023), Todd Rogers and Jessica Lasky-Fink draw on behavioural science to show that fewer words and a simpler reading level make readers more likely to read, understand and act on a message.
So, what is the recipe for success? Ask an expert for help. Or rather, two experts. Your most important expert is always your intended audience: if you write for the general public or for patients, test your content with people from that audience. I would also involve a language professional, who can help you identify and fix the language issues in your content. Style guides, templates and standards help too. ISO 24495-1, the international plain language standard published in 2023, sets out four principles: readers should get what they need, and be able to find it, understand it and use it.
For a one-page overview of the whole writing process, see my model for plain language writing. And for an example of where plain language matters for medical devices, read my blog on the SSCP patient section.
Your Halloween zombie check
So this Halloween, give your next Plain Language Summary, Patient Information Sheet, Informed Consent Form, or Summary of Safety and Clinical Performance a quick zombie check. Search the text for words ending in -ment, -ion, -ance and -ity, and ask of each sentence: who is doing what? Turn the zombies back into verbs, and your readers get a treat instead of a trick.