Your first draft contains the route, not the destination

Why drafts are long

Writing is how most people work out what they think. The consequence is that a first draft is a record of the thinking: the approach, the false start, the qualification you added while deciding, the restatement that was you checking you still agreed with yourself.

None of that is useful to a reader, who wants the conclusion and the reasons, not the journey to them. This is why cutting your own work is so productive and so uncomfortable: the material you are removing is not bad, it is just yours rather than theirs.

A workable target for a first cut is a third gone with nothing lost. People disbelieve this until they try it.

Delete the first paragraph

Start here, because it works almost every time. Read your opening paragraph, delete it, and read what is now the first sentence. In most drafts the piece starts better, because paragraph one was throat-clearing: context nobody asked for, a scene-set, a definition, a what I want to talk about today.

The same is true of the last paragraph surprisingly often, which is usually the writer summarising what they just said because they are reluctant to stop.

Six mechanical passes

These are things you can do without judgement, which is what makes them possible on your own work.

1. Nominalisations back into verbs. “We made a decision to undertake a review of” → “we decided to review”. Look for words ending in -tion, -ment, -ance; each one is usually a verb wearing a coat.
2. Adverbs before strong verbs. “Completely destroyed”, “absolutely essential”, “very unique”. If the verb is right the adverb is padding; if the adverb is doing the work, the verb is wrong.
3. ”There is” and “it is” openings. “There is a problem with the timing” → “the timing is wrong”. This one alone cuts several per cent from most drafts.
4. Qualifier stacks. “Somewhat quite often”, “may possibly be able to”. Keep one hedge where you mean it; delete the rest, because a stack of hedges reads as a lack of confidence rather than as precision.
5. Repeated ideas in different clothes. Search your draft for two sentences that make the same point. Keep the more concrete one.
6. The word “that”. Delete every instance and put back only those whose absence broke the sentence. Usually about half.

Read the last sentence first

A trick for finding structural flab rather than word-level flab: read your paragraphs from the bottom of the piece upwards, one at a time. Out of sequence, you cannot lean on the momentum of your own argument, and a paragraph that only exists because of the one before it becomes obvious: it has no content of its own to stand on.

Cut against a real limit

Abstract editing drifts. Editing against a number does not. Set the limit before you start: 240 words for a ninety-second narration, 125 characters before the fold, 40 characters on a subject line, a single side of A4.

A hard limit changes the question from “is this good?”, which has no stopping point, to “what earns its place in 240?”, which does. It is also the mechanism behind the old observation about not having time to write a short letter: brevity is not the absence of effort, it is the product of a second pass that a deadline usually eats.

Read it aloud, again

The same test as for scripts finds different things in prose. Sentences you cannot say in one breath are too long. Sentences where you speed up are usually padding: your own voice skipping ahead to the part that matters. Mark those and cut to the part you sped up towards.

Where cutting goes wrong

There is a failure at the far end, and it is real. Compression removes redundancy, and redundancy is partly what makes text comprehensible: the restatement that lets a reader who missed a clause catch up, the example that makes an abstraction concrete, the transition that says how this paragraph relates to the last one. Strip all of it and you get prose that is technically shorter and materially harder, where every sentence is load-bearing and missing one means missing everything.

This matters more for a reader who is tired, distracted, reading on a phone on a bus, or reading in their second or third language. Dense is not the same as clear.

The distinction to hold is between repetition that helps and repetition that is you hearing yourself. An example that makes an idea concrete earns its place. A second statement of an idea already stated does not. The test is whether a reader who understood the first instance gains anything from the second.