Why it matters when you are writing
The tell is a sentence whose main verb is doing no work. “Conduct,” “perform,” “provide,” “make,” and every form of “to be” often signal that the real action has been packed into a noun beside them. “We performed an evaluation of the intervention” buries “evaluated.” Recovering the verb usually shortens the sentence by a third and restores the actor at the same time.
Nominalization also lets you omit agents without using the passive voice, which is why it accumulates in institutional prose. “The implementation of the policy resulted in a reduction in compliance costs” never says who implemented anything or whose costs fell. Sometimes that vagueness is deliberate. In your own writing it is usually accidental, and a reader who cannot tell who did what cannot evaluate your claim.
The noun form is not always wrong. When the process itself is your topic — when you write about analysis as a practice, or compare two implementations — the noun is the correct choice. The test is whether the sentence has a real verb left. One nominalization with a strong verb is fine; three in a row with “is” holding them together is a sentence to rewrite.
