Most first drafts are longer than they need to be, and that's fine — writing long and cutting later is often faster than trying to be perfect the first time. The skill that matters is knowing what to cut once the draft exists. Concise writing isn't about chopping sentences in half; it's about removing words that do no work.
Find the words that aren't earning their place
Qualifiers like very, really, quite and somewhat rarely add meaning — they just soften a claim you should make directly. "The results were very significant" is weaker than "the results were significant." If a word can disappear without changing what the sentence means, it should disappear.
The same goes for throat-clearing phrases: "in order to" can almost always become "to." "Due to the fact that" becomes "because." "At this point in time" becomes "now." None of these changes lose information — they just remove the padding around it.
Turn hidden verbs back into verbs
Nominalisations — verbs turned into nouns — quietly bloat sentences. "We conducted an investigation into the matter" hides the verb investigate inside a noun and props it up with "conducted." Compare:
- Weak: "The team made a decision to postpone the launch."
- Strong: "The team decided to postpone the launch."
Hunt for sentences with "make a," "conduct a," "carry out a" or "perform a" in front of a noun, and see whether the noun wants to be a verb instead.
Cut at the sentence and paragraph level too
Once you've trimmed individual words, step back. Do you say the same thing twice in different words a few sentences apart? Does the second half of a sentence just restate the first half for emphasis? Read each paragraph and ask what it would lose if you deleted the first sentence — introductory throat-clearing sentences are often disposable once you know where the paragraph is going.
Concise writing takes a second pass, not talent. Draft freely, then return with a single question for every sentence: what happens if I take this word out? If nothing is lost, leave it out.
