- 1Try
- 2Learn
- 3Practise
- 4Check
The rule, in three lines
Turning a verb clause into a noun phrase and back, which is what separates school German from university German. Nachdem wir die Daten geprüft hatten becomes Nach der Prüfung der Daten. The second direction matters most: reading German officialese is exactly the work of undoing it.
The usual slip. Overdoing it. A text where everything is a noun becomes unreadable, and German style guides have a name for it, Substantivitis, and hunt it down. The other side is not recognising it when reading: if you cannot unpack Nach Prüfung der Unterlagen, half an official letter stays closed.
Why it catches you out. English fights this style on purpose: every style guide tells you to prefer the verb, and «after checking the data» is what a native writes. So an English speaker has the opposite instinct to the one German academic writing demands, and has to switch it on deliberately.