How to cut 20% of your words without losing anything
A mechanical editing pass anyone can run: seven cuts that shrink word count while making the writing stronger, with before-and-after examples.
5 min read · Reviewed July 2026
First drafts run fat. That’s fine — drafting and editing are different jobs. What most people lack is a mechanical way to do the second job. Here’s the pass I use: seven specific cuts, run in order, checkable with the counter above. It reliably removes about a fifth of any draft while making it sharper.
The seven cuts
One: throat-clearing openers. ‘It’s worth noting that’, ‘In today’s world’, ‘As we all know’ — delete the phrase; the sentence survives intact every time.
Two: double qualifiers. ‘Quite possibly’, ‘somewhat unusual’, ‘very unique’. Pick one word or zero.
Three: passive constructions that hide the actor. ‘Mistakes were made by the team’ → ‘The team made mistakes.’ Shorter, and someone owns the verb now.
Four: nominalizations — verbs frozen into nouns. ‘Make a decision’ → ‘decide’. ‘Conduct an analysis of’ → ‘analyze’. Each one you thaw saves two or three words.
Five: redundant pairs. ‘Each and every’, ‘first and foremost’, ‘basic fundamentals’. English inherited these from lawyers hedging in two languages; you need one word.
Six: prepositional pileups. ‘The results of the analysis of the data from the survey’ → ‘the survey results.’
Seven: the last sentence of most paragraphs. Writers summarize what they just said out of nervousness. If the paragraph made its point, the recap is dead weight.
Run it with numbers
Paste your draft in the counter and note the word count. Run the seven cuts. Most people land 15-25% lighter, and the readability score climbs as a side effect — the cuts above remove exactly the constructions that drag Flesch scores down. The piece doesn’t just get shorter. It gets faster, and readers feel the difference even if they can’t name it.