Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing.

In my previous essay, I wrote about nominalization — the deployment as nouns of words we mostly expect to encounter as verbs or adjectives. Aware of many people’s tendency to vilify this kind of usage, I speculated about the psychology behind it. I was interested in thinking about why someone might prefer “Do you have a solve for this problem?” to “Can you solve this problem?”

Like many of the readers who commented, I find that some nominalizations are useful and others are jarring. I can accept that language changes (and has to change) without necessarily cherishing all manifestations of that change. I don’t shudder when I see or hear “This year’s spend is excessive” and “Her book was a good read,” even though I can think of other, perhaps more elegant ways of saying these things. On the other hand, “There is no undo for that” strikes me as infelicitous, and I am still not completely comfortable with the use of the noun “disconnect” as a synonym for “disparity” or “discrepancy” — although it has been around since the 1980s.

In some cases a nominalization is the specialist vocabulary of a particular profession or community: it has connotations of expertise and — less often — of an insider’s self-regard. For instance, people who work in software talk about the “build,” and I recently heard a real estate agent speak of creating a “seduce” for property. When these terms of art gain wider currency, it is largely because nonspecialists are eager to seem conversant with the ins and outs of an esoteric subject. Sometimes we adopt such terms in a jocular or satirical spirit — but end up using them without a whiff of irony.

In the last couple of decades, many condensed forms of expression have achieved currency thanks to the spread of electronic communication: when we bash out e-mails and text messages, we feel the need for speed. Several readers made this point. Nominalizations allow us to pack the information in our sentences more densely. This urgency comes in other guises: nouns get verbed as often as verbs get nouned. (I had to go and lie down after writing that.)

What I didn’t discuss in my first post was the dark side of nominalization. It’s not just that nominalization can sap the vitality of one’s speech or prose; it can also eliminate context and mask any sense of agency. Furthermore, it can make something that is nebulous or fuzzy seem stable, mechanical and precisely defined. That may sound like a virtue, but it’s really a way of repudiating ambiguity and complexity.

Nominalizations give priority to actions rather than to the people responsible for them. Sometimes this is apt, perhaps because we don’t know who is responsible or because responsibility isn’t relevant. But often they conceal power relationships and reduce our sense of what’s truly involved in a transaction. As such, they are an instrument of manipulation, in politics and in business. They emphasize products and results, rather than the processes by which products and results are achieved.

I touched previously on “What is the ask?” As an alternative to “What are they asking?” or “What are we being asked to do?” this can seem crisp. It takes an aerial view of an issue. But it calculatedly omits reference to the people doing the asking, as a way of keeping their authority and power out of the question.

At the same time, by turning the act of asking into something narrow and impersonal, “What is the ask?” repositions a question as a command. It leaves little or no room for the “ask” to be refused. As a noun, “ask” is pretty much a synonym for “order.” Even when we retain details of agency — as in “What is their ask of us?” – the noun ossifies what could and should be a more dynamic process.

Compared with “What is the ask?” the question “What’s the take-away from today’s lecture?” may look harmless. Yet it minimizes audience members’ sense of their responsibility to absorb the lecture’s lessons. “What should I take away from today’s lecture?” is a question that betrays a cramped and probably exam-focused understanding of what it means to learn. But “What’s the take-away?” seems to represent education as a product rather than a practice. It invites an answer that’s a sound bite, a Styrofoam-sheathed portion of spice, a handy little package to be slavishly reproduced.

Such phrasing also curtails the lecturer’s role, making him or her not so much a source of ideas and a repository of intellectual trust as a purveyor of data packets. This may be an unhappy accident, or it may be strategic – perhaps a disavowal of the very notion that education is personal.

Nominalizations aren’t intrinsically either good or bad. Yet, used profusely, they strip the humanity out of what we write and say. They can also be furtively political. Their boosters see them as marvels of concision, but one person’s idea of streamlining is another’s idea of a specious and ethically doubtful simplicity.

Henry Hitchings is the author of three books exploring language and history, including, most recently, “The Language Wars.”