Technique Tuesday: Nominalizations

Nominalizations are a type of passive writing.  They're empty nouns.  How do you know you're nominalizing?

There's no subject in your sentence: The positioning of the statue was good. (The question of course, is who or what positioned the statue?). It's accompanied by the words like a, an, the, his, her, these, several, of, utilization, sadness, taking. The taking of flight 456 was horrible.

It's not that you can't use nominalizations, but make sure you're using them correctly. If...