In the final stages of your writing project, especially when writing short pieces such as columns, college applications, or resumes, brevity is critical. These tips should help you when you have beaten your structure into shape, lined up your ideas, and clarified your sentences, but it’s still a dozen words too long. We’ve pulled inspiration from Roy Peter Clark’s How to Write Short. We’ve also included some tips on how to find these targets in your document.
Here are a few tips on cutting when your piece is already perfect:
Adverbs: They modify verbs and are rarely essential. Removing them will focus your voice.
Ctrl + F, type in “ly” and see what comes up. Adverbs may change your tone but usually don’t change your message. Cut everything you can.
Read sentence by sentence, working backward. Identify verbs and find their corresponding adverbs.
Adjectives: They modify nouns and add detail to your work. But when time is short, get rid of them.
Read sentence by sentence, working backward. Identify nouns and find their corresponding adjectives.
Intensifiers: Words that do nothing but amplify an existing word. These can also be used to find some unnecessary adjectives or adverbs. (Grammar-Monster has an excellent explanation of intensifiers here.)
Examples: very, quite, incredibly, really, insanely, awfully, dreadfully, terribly, extremely, fairly, pretty.
Qualifiers: Words that can limit or enhance the meaning of another word. (See Grammarly’s explanation for more detail here.)
Examples: seems, kind of, sort of, mostly, somewhat, sometimes, always, usually, best, worst, heaviest, most, least, really.
Notice these categories begin to overlap. Adjectives and Adverbs are defined by the type of word they modify. Intensifiers and Qualifiers are defined by how they modify the word.
Jargon: Unnecessarily technical terms. This is highly dependent on your audience. If you’re writing for a professional or expert audience, you may use more jargon than if you are writing for the masses.
Examples of business jargon: best practice, core competency, due diligence, drill down, low-hanging fruit, scalable, sweat equity.
Examples of military jargon: roger, Ground Zero, AWOL, SNAFU, Oscar Mike, SITREP, squared away.
These examples should not suggest these terms are incorrect or inappropriate for all writing. In many cases, you may lose some style when you cut. But when every word counts, cutting these out can distill your writing to the bare minimum, squeezing you into your word limits and maximizing efficiency.
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