Globalization gives me the creeps...

Now that I know that "globalization" is a "zombie" noun, I feel like I expose myself to the undead whenever I put down in a cover letter the following sentence: "I specialize in literature and globalization."

"Zombie" nouns, according to Helen Sword, an Auckland-based academic, are results of nominalization, a process via which new nouns are formed from other parts of speech (from an adjective, an active verb or another noun). 

Why "zombie"? 

Because they cannibalize active verbs, suck the lifeblood from adjectives and substitute abstract entities for human beings.

Zombie nouns are used mostly by academics, lawyers, bureaucrats and business writers (who have no business using zombie nouns).

I confess I have used many a zombie noun in my academic essays. I've always found it difficult to express abstract and cerebral concepts in concrete terms. I take Ms. Sword's advice and will try to write of complex thoughts in "language [that] remains firmly anchored in the physical world."

How to write?

Revision, writes novelist Colson Whitehead, is a cardinal rule of the art of writing:

Revision is when you do what you should have done the first time, but didn’t. It’s like washing the dishes two days later instead of right after you finish eating.

Just as days-old unwashed dishes could get encrusted with food-residue, something that you want to revise out of contention, could stubbornly leach back into your writing. But as the graphic above shows, you can always see the progression from the "I didn't want this" to "yes, this is what I want to say!"

On the whole Whitehead writes a mighty engaging set of rules. I really took to "rule #9":

Have adventures. The Hemingway mode was in ascendancy for decades before it was eclipsed by trendy fabulist “exercises.” The pendulum is swinging back, though, and it’s going to knock these effete eggheads right out of their Aeron chairs. Keep ahead of the curve. Get out and see the world. It’s not going to kill you to butch it up a tad. Book passage on a tramp steamer. Rustle up some dysentery; it’s worth it for the fever dreams alone. Lose a kidney in a knife fight. You’ll be glad you did.

I always wonder about the discrepancy between the books that people write and the lives that they live. Take for instance E.L. James, the scribe that produced the bestselling trilogy of the grey shades of kinky sex.

Take a look at her photograph--yes, she is an amply endowed female with a British face. She must be one of the "effete eggheads" who cut pasted sex-descriptors from the entire oeuvre of western erotica, ranging from the classic to the moronic.

Wonder if the writing would have been less reviled had it come from James' direct experience of and participation in the adventures of sadomasochism/violent sex.

Show don't tell

Grammar is a piano I play by ear, since I seem to have been out of school the year the rules were mentioned. All I know of grammar is its infinite power. To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object being photographed. Many people know about camera angles now, but not so many know about sentences. The arrangement of words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in you mind. The picture dictates the arrangement. The picture dictates whether this will be a sentence with or without clauses, a sentence that ends hard or a dying-fall sentence, long or short, active or passive. The picture tells you how to arrange words and the arrangement of the words tells you, or tells me, what’s going on in the picture Nota bene: It tells you. You don’t tell it.

Joan Didion, "Why I Write"