Academic Writing: Structures:Examples of Extended nominal groups

Academic writing can often include very large or extended nominal groups; for example:
(each nominal group is represented by a different colour)

The conventional wisdom, which interpreted Australian social history as the working out of the egalitarian radicalism of the nineteenth century, came under sustained attack from a number of writers in the 1950's and 60's.

Executive authority, the power of the final political decision, is vested in a ministry whose members in Australia must be members of Parliament to whom they are individually and collectively responsible.

As you can see from the examples, a nominal group can expand to include a wide range of information. In fact, in academic writing the density of information in a sentence is usually quite high; you can convey a lot of meaning through the use of a few words.

One of the factors responsible for the difference in formality between the model texts was the presence of large nominal groups. Look at these excerpts from the model texts. Each nominal group has been highlighted.

Formal Text	Informal Text
The inequity in the distribution of wealth in Australia is yet another indicator of Australia's lack of egalitarianism.	Because only a few people have most of the money and power in Australia, I conclude that it is not an equal society.
... most Australians continue to remain in the class into which they were born (McGregor,1988: 156) despite arguments about the ease of social mobility in Australian society (Fitzpatrick, 1994).	... most people when they are born into one class, end up staying in that class for their whole lives.
The relative disadvantage of women with regard to their earnings and levels of asset ownership indicates that within classes there is further economic inequity based on gender ...	Women earn less than men and own less than men. Why is this so?

There are various ways of expanding nominal groups to include a wide range of information; one method is to extend the nominal group by embedding information into it that modifies the meaning of the noun.