Our “noun‑oriented” versus “verb‑oriented” world
From style advice to a way of seeing the world
(Since writing this, I have encountered research on cognition words that gives us another perspective on putting people’s action into words. Check out my Thinking Words posts.
When I read a summary of the essay "“The Future of Being Human: A Critical Complementary Investment Thesis" by Indy Johar with a discussion of our “noun‑oriented” versus “verb‑oriented” world, it got me thinking about that familiar writing guidance revealing a much deeper fault line—not just in style, but in how we understand being human at all.
In most writing manuals, the advice to “prefer verbs to nouns” sounds technical and narrow: avoid nominalizations, put people in the sentence, choose strong verbs. But what does it mean in a world of interlocking systems?
From style advice to a way of seeing
Conventional guidance on nominalizations is straightforward. A nominalization happens when you turn an action into a thing
“decide” becomes “make a decision,”
“comply” becomes “achieve compliance,”
“fail to inspect” becomes “a failure of inspection.”
Writing centres, style guides, and plain‑language advocates point out that this habit tends to make sentences longer, more abstract, and harder to follow.
But the problem is not just that nominalizations are clunky. They also erase life from the sentence. When verbs become nouns, someone disappears.
“The termination of services occurred after the implementation of new procedures” sounds as if reality simply rearranged itself.
“The department introduced new procedures and stopped offering services to low‑income clients” insists on agents and actions.
The grammar forces us to ask: who did what, to whom, and with what consequences?
Johar’s distinction between a noun‑oriented and a verb‑oriented world works at a different scale but points in the same direction.
A noun‑oriented worldview sees reality as a collection of discrete objects and outcomes: assets, identities, products, properties, targets.
A verb‑oriented worldview, by contrast, sees processes and relationships: caring, learning, becoming, co‑creating, maintaining.
The first tilts us toward ownership and control; the second toward stewardship and entanglement.
I am struck by how naturally the micro‑level of sentences and the macro‑level of systems slide over one another. I see a page dense with nominalizations as the linguistic surface of a noun‑oriented world. Verb‑rich writing, which keeps naming who does what, to whom, and how, is the everyday practice of a verb‑oriented imagination.
How verbs pull us back to people
One way to see this is to notice what we must do, cognitively, when we repair a nominalization. Take two quick examples drawn from typical bureaucratic or legal prose:
“The implementation of the policy resulted in the discontinuation of services.”
“Following a failure of oversight, an escalation of risk occurred.”
If we follow standard plain‑language guidance and “turn the nouns back into verbs,” several things happen at once:
We must name an agent:
“The department implemented the policy and stopped offering services to families.”
“The oversight team missed the warning signs, and the agency put clients at greater risk.”
We must choose a verb that actually describes the action.
“Implementation” hides a whole chain of events; “introduced,” “rolled out,” or “imposed” each tell a slightly different story.
“Escalation of risk” becomes “put clients at greater risk,” which makes the harm explicit.
And we almost always have to clarify relationships: to whom did this happen, and in what context? “The discontinuation of services” floats in a vacuum; “stopped offering services to low‑income clients” demands that we picture the people affected.
In other words, the simple editorial move of preferring verbs does more than tidy our prose. It forces us to bring actors, actions, and relationships back into the frame. It moves our attention from procedure to responsibility, from “what the system did” to “what people in the system did to other people.”
That is very close to Johar’s concern:
A noun‑oriented world, he suggests, habitually obscures the relational and political stakes of our systems—it talks about “governance,” “service delivery,” “resource allocation” as if no one in particular is deciding or caring or being harmed.
A verb‑oriented world refuses that erasure. It insists that institutions are nothing more or less than ongoing patterns of behaviour and relationship.
Institutions as verbs, not statues
This is where the connection becomes more than a neat metaphor. Johar’s “verb orientation” asks us to see institutions themselves as verbs, not statues:
not “The State” as a looming noun, but governing as a set of continuous actions,
not “The Market” as an entity, but trading, valuing, and exploiting as evolving practices,
not “The System” as fate, but system‑building and system‑maintaining as choices.
Our default public prose pushes in the opposite direction. Policy documents, regulations, corporate statements, and even news coverage are saturated with abstract nouns: “compliance,” “implementation,” “enforcement,” “optimisation,” “service provision,” “engagement.” The cumulative effect is to make institutions feel natural, impersonal, and static—as if they were weather systems we can only endure.
Verb‑centred writing can quietly undermine that illusion. When we rewrite “non‑compliance will result in termination of benefits” as “if you do not send us this form, we will stop your benefits,” we have made the institution answerable in language. We have turned a faceless process into someone using power. We have acknowledged that institutions are made and remade, day by day, by specific decisions.
Seen this way, the stylistic preference for verbs is not just about energy or elegance but an ethical and political choice about where to locate agency. Do we allow structures and processes to pose as autonomous nouns, moving on their own? Or do we insist, sentence by sentence, that what looks like “the system” is really a continuous unfolding of human activity?
Writing as a small act of civilizational design
Johar often talks about “civilizational design”—the idea that our laws, infrastructures, finances, and technologies are not neutral tools but expressions of what we think humans and relationships are for. If we design for control and prediction, we get brittle systems that treat people as objects to be managed. If we design for relationship and emergence, we make space for mutual becoming.
Writing is one of those design surfaces. The forms and phrases we reach for—especially in institutional contexts—teach readers how to see themselves:
as subjects of processes, or
as participants in relationships.
Nominalizations tend to teach submission.
We learn that “a decision was made,” “a determination was reached,” “a review is underway,” with no hand on the lever. Verb‑centered sentences, by contrast, keep pointing to hands, eyes, and voices: “the panel decided,” “the board refused,” “the team is reviewing your case.”
Over time, this is a different civic education. One normalizes the idea that systems are something that happen to us. The other keeps alive the idea that systems are something we do and could do differently.
In a sense, the habit of asking, “Where is the verb? Who is the subject?” is a tiny daily rehearsal of verb‑oriented consciousness. It trains us to see processes, responsibilities, and relationships, even when the prevailing culture would prefer we did not.
Putting people “in motion” without erasing structures
There is a risk here, of course. Focusing on verbs and agents can be read as a call to individualism: if we just name who did what, we might overlook the deeper structures that shape those choices. A badly handled verb‑orientation could become another way of blaming individuals—front‑line workers, say—while leaving background architectures untouched.
This is where Johar’s broader frame around entanglement and conditions is helpful. Verb‑orientation, for him, is not about shrinking everything to personal responsibility. It is about seeing that everyone and everything is doing something, all the time, and that those doings are knotted together.
When we write with verbs, the invitation is not to say, “It’s all on you,” but to keep both levels visible:
This person or team took this specific action.
They did it within this pattern of rules, incentives, histories, and relationships.
Good verb‑based writing can hold both truths. “The agency denied the claim under rules that make it almost impossible for migrants to qualify” is more honest than either “a denial of the claim occurred” or “immigration officers are cruel.” It names the action and gestures to the system that shapes it.
So perhaps the question is not whether verbs make us think more about people than about institutions. It is whether verbs help us to see that institutions are nothing but people and their activities, repeated and reinforced over time. When we write as if structures were independent nouns, we are half‑way to absolving ourselves of the responsibility to change them.
A practice of attention
For writers, then, Johar’s noun/verb distinction offers a kind of spiritual deepening of familiar advice. To favour verbs is not just to “sound more active” or “keep readers engaged.” It is to practice a certain kind of attention:
Attention to who is acting and who is affected.
Attention to the flows of care, neglect, and power between them.
Attention to the fact that nothing in public life is as fixed as it sounds when we turn it into a noun.
Each time we catch ourselves writing “implementation,” “engagement,” or “service provision” and instead name who did what, we are making a tiny wager on a different future. We are betting that readers deserve to see the world as a pattern of relationships they might influence, rather than as a landscape of impersonal objects and rules.
That is not, by itself, enough to transform the “future of being human.” But it is a place where those larger shifts begin: in the sentences we choose, the verbs we honour, and the ways we let language either freeze or release the living processes underneath.
What say you?
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