The Plain English Revolt
Grammar: Nominalisation
A Level 6 English lesson exploring society.
What's in this lesson
A Level 6 (proficiency) ESL lesson on society, practising nominalisation. The worksheet has a reading, target vocabulary, a grammar reference with practice and discussion questions.
From the reading: The Plain English Revolt
In the spring of 1979, a woman named Chrissie Maher stood outside the Houses of Parliament in London and fed thousands of government forms into a shredder. The act was theatrical — deliberately, unapologetically so — but the provocation behind it was serious: that the language of official Britain, dense with nominalisation and syntactic prestige, had become a system of exclusion as effective as any locked door. The forms she destroyed were the kind that determined whether a family received housing benefit, whether a pensioner understood their entitlements, whether a citizen could exercise their rights without hiring a lawyer to decode the prose. Her campaign, which she named the Plain English Campaign, was not, at its core, about style. It was about power.
Vocabulary
- counter-discourse
- lexical density
- stylistic choice
- syntactic prestige
Grammar: Nominalisation
- Nominalise for
- The implementation of the policy led to measurable improvements. — distance creates institutional weight
- De-nominalise for
- The government implemented the policy and results improved. — named actor, clear accountability
Discussion questions
- Will plain language movements grow more powerful as distrust of institutions deepens?
- How will AI change the gap between official language and ordinary speech?
- Which profession will need to change its language most urgently in the next decade?
The Plain English Revolt
Grammar: Nominalisation
What's in this lesson:
Full lesson plan with reading, grammar, vocabulary, and discussion.
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