My favorite Doonesbury cartoon, from January 23, 1980, features a press conference. A journalist asks Senator Kennedy a question. The senator responds with a series of strung-together phrases: “Well, in this moment of national crisis, any second-guessing that I … er … personally, with respect to the interests of peace. Moreover, with the … uh … unchallenged Soviet threat, the … er … grain embargo which …  uh …  as far as strong leadership in this country! Now, in respect to the …” The journalist interrupts: “A verb, Senator, we need a verb.”
That line— “A verb, Senator, we need a verb”—pops into my head every time I encounter a noun cluster, by which I mean a string of four or more words that normally function as nouns (with the occasional adjective thrown in). If you read much technical text, you know what I’m talking about. Noun clusters are phrases like these:
- batch high performance computing facility
- service level agreement achievement percentage
- business computing solution areas
- security policy orchestration software
- business process improvement methodologies
- cloud service orchestration workflows
- online real time cloud data landscape view
- open web services back end
- disaster recovery site database failover
- engagement employment focused case management
- network services provisioning process
- remote encryption passphrase reset
- search engine optimization domain name notification proposal notice (I am not making that up)
Sometimes called noun stacks, noun strings, or noun compounds—noun piles, anyone?—noun clusters can shut down your comprehension even if you understand each word. Web-accessibility specialist Cliff Tyllick, who prefers the term noun pileups, says that several nouns in a row do to the flow of reading what a multicar pileup does to the flow of traffic. When you encounter a noun cluster, you stop. You may have to back up. You may navigate around the words. You may even take the nearest exit and do the last thing the writer wanted you to do: move on to someone else’s words.
To bust noun clusters when you write or edit, first get clear on what you want to say. If you don’t know, ask; you can’t bust a noun cluster until you understand what it means—and noun clusters notoriously obscure meaning. Then, when you know what needs to be said, try these techniques:
Rearrange the words.
Convert a noun to a verb.
Add hyphens.
Add punctuation.
Bag it all and rephrase.
Check out these alternatives to a few of the above examples. (I guessed at the meaning on some of these. If I were revising for a client, I’d ask for confirmation.)
- a high-performance, batch-computing facility
- the percentage of service-level agreements achieved
- areas [types?]Â of business-computing solution
- software that orchestrates security policies
- methodologies that improve business processes
You get the idea.
And you can do one more thing. Have fun with your clusters. Collect and share them with word lovers everywhere. You can do just that by adding to my list, “Noun-Cluster Clunkers.” Let me put it another way. Please join me in some noun cluster clunker list addition creation activity merry-making. Consider it preparation for your next press conference.
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Here’s my Listly (interactive) list of noun-cluster clunkers. Like them. Share them. Add to them. Try it!
Grape image (without the words) courtesy of KnowItSome [GNU Free Documentation License, CC-BY-SA-3.0 or CC-BY-2.5] via Wikimedia Commons.
This post first appeared July 15, 2014, as a guest post on the Content Rules blog.
Spot on. and often times the nouns blend together to form a cliche and then they start string cliches together. When will it end?
Thanks for sharing, I enjoy your posts and your perspectives.
Dave
You’re welcome, Dave. Thanks for the comment.
Thank you, thank you. I worked for a VP of Marketing at a small software company, and I could NOT get him to grasp this. His ad headlines were — may I say it? — clusterf**ks.
Now I’ll have this post bookmarked to show to future clients or bosses who think they can write.
🙂