Nominalisation Yin and 'Yang'

You can easily avoid relative clauses when you're post-modifying nouns. This is especially useful in IELTS Task 1 writing where you have to modify a statistics word (number, amount, etc.) to include information from the axes of a graph, or from the labels attached to a chart, or from the column and row headings of a table.
yin yang
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Here I want to appeal to Indonesian students to think again before translating yang when post-modifying nouns.

Let's compare a few sentences written by Indonesian students with their likely equivalents written by native English speakers:

Modified noun
picture
Student sentence with error
The picture that on the wall is from Australia.
Student sentence without error
The picture that is on the wall is from Australia.
Native speaker
The picture on the wall is from Australia.
Strategy used
preposition phrase to post-modify the noun
Modified noun
person
Student sentence with error
The person who teach us is PG.
Student sentence without error
The person who is teaching us is PG.
Native speaker
The person teaching us is PG.
Strategy used
___ing to to post-modify the noun
Modified noun
department store
Student sentence with error
The department store that located in Bridge Street is SOGO.
Student sentence without error
The department store that is located in Bridge Street is SOGO.
Native speaker
The department store located in Bridge Street is SOGO.
Strategy used
V3 to post-modify the noun

In these examples I used three very useful strategies to post-modify nouns:

  • preposition phrases
  • ___ing
  • V3
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Notice that when you avoid the relative pronoun that (YANG!), then you also avoid a common error made by Indonesian students - not adding the verb to be to the relative clause.

Try using these strategies instead of relative clauses and see how it increases your score for vocabulary in IELTS writing and speaking!