How to reduce your word count without reducing your content I can, however, offer a good example from the original title of this blog post: I can't give you a list of other words to delete, though-context will be important. Very is a frequent offender, but it is by no means the only word that takes up more space than it's worth. Delete other words that aren't pulling their weight Although there are occasions on which very serves a purpose, usually its disappearance would go unnoticed. Her point was that the difference between a useful grammar tip and a very useful one is not clear, so we should just drop the very. The above-mentioned editing instructor advised that whenever we were tempted to use the v word- very -we might as well use a certain d word (objections to which might be more familiar) instead. The revised version is six words shorter. I also removed "and biology" because, although not redundant, it wasn't relevant to the class in magazine editing. When I was studying journalism at the University of Missouri-Columbia, one of the most memorable classes I took was in magazine editing. I realized that I don't need to tell you I was in college at my college. When I was in college at the University of Missouri-Columbia, where I studied journalism and biology, one of the most memorable classes I took was in magazine editing. Here's an example from an earlier draft of this post: Many times, we say the same thing in multiple ways in close proximity. Perhaps one day you'll even find the task of reducing your word count to be an enjoyable challenge! 1. Nonetheless, I hope these seven tips will allow you, too, to see the possibilities. The best I can do is to offer some general suggestions and examples, but this list is by no means exhaustive. There is never any one correct edit each sentence holds endless possible revisions. When I see a creative edit someone else has made, or when I finally hit upon an inventive solution myself, it expands my repertoire of possible methods of attack. I wish I could give you some hard-and-fast rules, but as I think about how I've learned to edit for conciseness, experience seems to have been the most important teacher. I realize I still haven't answered the question I posed a few paragraphs ago, though: what do you cut?
That single exercise taught me to look for more concise language in creative ways, and I always enjoy the challenge of tightening my own or others' writing. The paragraph was now half as long, and more elegant at that! But when the instructor revealed the professionally revised paragraph, none of us had come close to achieving comparable results. We fell to scribbling in our notebooks, and when time was up we each had managed to remove some words here and there.
The instructor projected a paragraph on the white board and challenged us all to reduce the word count as much as possible -without removing a single bit of content. Although I'm sure I learned many things from this class, one class session in particular stands out in my memory. But if you're sure all your content should stay and the thought of removing any of it feels like cutting off a part of your body, don't despair. Those are great considerations-a good rule of thumb is that cutting about a third from the early draft of any piece of writing is likely to improve it. Maybe you need to cut whole sentences, you think. If somehow such a manuscript made it to production, your copyeditor would just have to add all those articles back in, and then you'd be right back where you started from. Yet articles are essential elements of English grammar, and removing them makes your writing sound like someone's shorthand notes rather than a professional, serious communication.
Unfortunately, many authors succumb to this temptation. Deleting every instance of the alone would reduce the character count by 1,800. In fact, almost every sentence contains at least one and often several of them. It might occur to you that articles - a and the -account for quite a lot of the words in your manuscript. What should you do?Ī natural tendency would be to go searching for words you don't need. This means you need to cut somewhere around 325 words. The average length of an English word is just over five letters. The reviewers all like your manuscript and the editor is favorable-but you somehow have to get all that content communicated in 1,625 fewer characters in order to meet the journal's character limit of 55.000.