A Difficulty of Processional and Temporal Writing

A thought on the difficulties of processional and temporal writing.

I am in the midst of finishing edits to an article.  A reviewer suggested that I harbored an “unexamined essentialism” in my writing as grammatically I refer to substantives too often when talking about functional and processional concepts.  I mention this because I am likely not alone in having this problem, thought I have an uncommon but not unique solution.

Resist verbing and nominalization.  That is what I am doing that is throwing my reviewer off, and it is also why these articles take so long to write and edit.  It has been common for decades in philosophy in America, and philosophy in the West in general, to “verb nouns” (through usage to transform their functional part of speech from noun to verb) or to perform a “nominalization” (write the noun form of a verb and use it as the subject of the sentence).

My own compositional style has been compared to a “inexorable freight train” as I build my arguments linearly and always with a sense of an anticipated goal (that I do not always reach).