Learn Dutch: Het bezoek aan de huisarts duurde kort.

With the noun bezoek (visit), Dutch uses the preposition aan when you are visiting a person, place, or institution. This links to the standard expression een bezoek brengen aan (to pay a visit to). If you used a verb indicating physical movement instead of a noun, you would use naar, as in Ik ging naar de huisarts (I went to the GP).

Why does the sentence use duurde kort instead of just was kort?

When expressing the duration of an event, Dutch strongly prefers using the verb duren (to last) combined with kort (short) or lang (long). While het bezoek was kort is grammatically acceptable, duurde kort sounds much more natural to native speakers because it explicitly emphasizes the length of time.

How does this sentence fit into our current lesson on nominal style (nominale stijl)?

Nominal style involves replacing a complete clause containing a conjugated verb with a noun phrase to make the text more compact. Here, instead of a full clause like Toen ik de huisarts bezocht (When I visited the GP), the action is compressed into the noun phrase Het bezoek aan de huisarts. While this sentence uses a standard noun (het bezoek) rather than the specific het + infinitive + van construction taught in this lesson, the underlying strategy of turning an action into a noun subject is exactly the same concept!