Chapter 4. Understanding objects and classes
This chapter covers:
If you want to confess a crime, you can say, “I shot the sheriff.”
If you want to write an academic paper about it, you express the same thing differently, something like this: “The shooting of the sheriff was carried out by the present author.”
The key difference between the two is that a verb becomes a noun; the verb form of shoot in the first one is replaced with the noun shooting in the second one. Experts on good writing style will tell you that the best one is the first, plainer way of putting it. It’s more immediate and easier to read; it gets your point across with less fooling around. And they are right, of course. Anyone can confirm that just by reading the two sentences.
But there is another point that is not apparent from the example. The noun form, shooting, does make the sentence harder to read. On the other hand, it lends itself to expressing more abstract ideas. For example, we could say, “shootings are a leading cause of death among sheriffs.” Epidemiologists and statisticians say this kind of thing all the time. Trying to rephrase it using the verb shoot may be possible, but probably awkward.
So when we’re expressing a simple, concrete message, the verb is the best choice, but if the message is more abstract, the noun may be the best or even the only choice.