Eight Ways to Reduce Your Word Count

“Brevity,” to quote Shakespeare, “is the soul of wit.”

That’s all well and good, yet Shakespeare’s own plays are so long they’re almost never performed without cuts. Being brief is hard. Blaise Pascal, who had plenty of wit about him, once explained that he had written more than usual “because I have not had the time to make it shorter.”

And anyway, how short do you really want it to be? There is such a thing as too short. Would you have wanted Lord of the Rings abridged to a postcard? (“Found a ring. It was bad. Chucked it. Best, Frodo.”) We have to preserve the heart and soul of the message while cutting all the extra verbal baggage we somehow manage to pile on.

This is especially true when writing pieces with word count restraints – whether it’s an article, a proposal, a dissertation, or an RFP response. Add a ticking clock to the mix, and finding the right, pithier words can feel like defusing a bomb.

Here are eight tips to help you to distil your prose effectively and efficiently.

1. Get an editor

A good editor excels at making text tighter and stronger – it’s their business. Got the budget and enough lead-in time before your deadline? Hire one. Otherwise, keep reading.

2. Slash the bubble wrap

A lot of the overwriting we do is like swaddling the message in linguistic bubble wrap. Sometimes it’s what Benjamin Dreyer calls “wan intensifiers”: words such as “very,” “rather,” “really,” and “quite” that give nothing more than a passing illusion of added meaning. Sometimes it’s unnecessary phrases such as “to put it one way,” “at the end of the day,” or “all things considered”. And sometimes it’s roundabout wording: “We kindly advise guests that the operation of this elevator will be suspended for repairs for the period ending Tuesday the 14th.” In those cases, you need to extract the central noun and action and toss the packing material: “This elevator is out of service until Tuesday.”

3. Trim the hedges

Hedges are related to bubble wrap (unless you work in shipping or landscaping): they add words to make the text feel safer. They include limiters like “from one perspective” and “at this time” and qualifiers like “potentially” and “likely.” Trim these wisely, though: sometimes a well-placed hedge can be the difference between a defensible truth and an overreaching assertion. In official documents such as proposals or regulatory submissions, “tends to” vs. “will” could be the difference between a peaceful day and a lawyer’s hotline.

4. Say it once

Redundant phrases inflate the word count unnecessarily – their contribution is already implied by the rest. This includes classics like “free gift” (if it’s not free it’s not a gift!) and “ATM machine” (the M stands for “machine”), as well as bilingual redundancies like “salsa sauce” and “chai tea”. Others are so well established you might miss them: “join together,” “passing fad,” “plan ahead.” Another common cause of verbiage is rehashing the same point in different words or from different angles.  

5. Skip the self-evident

Unless your text’s aim is to showcase your mastery of basics, such as in an essay or an exam, omit the obvious. The intended reader is the key here: auto mechanics won’t need an explanation of a camshaft, while a general audience might. On the other hand, “sweet fruit of the mango tree” needs just one word for pretty-much any audience. And before you start defending your literary expressiveness, answer this: do you have a word limit or don’t you? And are you really being literarily expressive or are you just blathering?

6. Cut to the chase

Many writers tend to “clear their throats” or “circle the pen” with broad introductory statements that seem like establishing shots in a movie, giving the lay of the land. Classic forms include “’Tis the season for [x],” “[X] is one of the most [y] of [z]” and “The dictionary defines [x] as [y].” These are often obvious or irrelevant. You may have needed to write all that preamble to help you clear your head and organize your thoughts, but it’s served its purpose now. To keep your audience engaged, start where your narrative really kicks off.

7. Use the ejector seat

To this point we’ve been talking about starting with text that’s too long and cutting it down. But sometimes, you can see it’s heading way over the word limit and cut your losses early. Just stop. Isolate the vital information, and the parts that will catch the reader’s attention, and ditch the rest. Hit the “Eject” button, blow out of your doomed overladen airship of prose, and start afresh.

8. Use Draftsmith

Despite your best efforts, trimming the fat from your writing can be tough, especially under a time crunch. Enter Draftsmith, an AI add-on for Microsoft Word. Offering sentence-by-sentence suggestions for brevity, it helps you to refine your text without diluting your personal flair. It even has a feature for shortening an entire paragraph without ever leaving Microsoft Word. This isn’t AI hijacking your document – but a tool aiding your thought clarification and revision ideas. The final call on suggestions remains yours. It’s a useful helper in time of need, especially when the clock is ticking.

Are you working on a document that needs a reduced word count? Why not get some free assistance? Try Draftsmith with a 7-day free trial here.