Nominal Groups
Using nominal groups is a way of making your
writing sound more precise, concise and complex. It is a way of condensing the
maximum amount of information down into as small a space as possible. Many of
you will already do this unconsciously; however it is useful to make it clear
what a nominal group is so that you can use it intentionally in your creative
writing coursework.
This is an example of a sentence that does not use
nominal groups. The high number of verbs and the fact that it is just a series
of simple sentences joined together makes it sound childish and simple:
I was a school boy and I was
thin and I was fourteen years old and I was secretive.
To make our writing sound
more complex and more formal we need to try and get rid of all of the
information that is contained in the simple sentences and include it all in one
big noun. The name for a big noun is a nominal
group:
I was a small, thin and secretive fourteen year old school boy.
Note how much more complex,
formal and adult this sounds.
However we can’t just
include the information in any order. The
classifier must come right before the noun for the sentence to sound
correct. The classifier is the kind of
thing the noun is – e.g. is it a school boy or an altar boy. The classifier
can also be what the noun is made of e.g. a tombstone made of sandstone is a sandstone tombstone.
The rest of the adjectives,
i.e. ‘thin’ ‘small’ and ‘secretive’ can be in any order, but must come before
the classifier.
We can also add a relative clause to give more detail
about the noun. The relative clause always come after the noun. A relative clause is
a clause that starts with who or which. For example:
I was a small, thin and
secretive fourteen year old school boy who passionately loved football.
Things to Remember: