nominalizations

An advisory by default: it explains, and blocks nothing, on a text whose verbs are turned into nouns (validation, agreement, stability) at a generated-writing rate.

What it catches

A text whose verbs are turned into nouns (validation, agreement, stability) at a generated-writing rate.

Dimension

economy: words that carry nothing. A finding is counted on the dimension of its rule, the cost it names to the reader.

Why

Reinhart et al. (PNAS 2025) measured GPT-4o using nominalizations at 2.1 times the human rate. A suffix is a guess at a nominalization, so the rule advises over a whole text and never points at one word. Over texts of 200 words or more, measured 2026-10-10: 808 agent pull request bodies from the AIDev set ran 55.2 per 1000 pooled (p50 49.8), and 79 percent run over the cap of 30; this repository's 96 hand-written docs pages ran 12.2 (p90 20.3, 1 percent over) and its 61 commit bodies 12.6 (2 percent over), both written by people and agents together. Review comments ran 14.5 by people and 35.4 by bots, pooled.

Default decision

The code is PRF4021. The decision depends on the kind of text judged:

Changing it

A decisions table sets this rule to deny, advise or off, for everything judged or for the files a glob matches. Proofread reads the table from the file its -decisions flag names:

{
  "rules": {"nominalizations": "deny"},
  "paths": {"blog/**": {"nominalizations": "off"}}
}

rules applies to every file. A glob in paths applies to the files it matches, and the last match wins. A rule set to off never reports.

Seeing it

A finding names the rule, its code and the decision that applies, and links here:

{"rule": "nominalizations", "code": "PRF4021", "decision": "advise", "url": "https://eli.gladman.cc/magus/reference/proofread/nominalizations/"}

proofread rules prints this entry with every other rule's.

See also

• All proofread rules - every rule, grouped by what it checks
• Writing rules - how the rules apply to this repository's pages and pull requests
• The findings contract - the fields every finding carries