Cutting a draft by a third

Almost every long draft is too long. That is not a failure; it is how drafts work. When you write your way towards a thought, you leave a trail behind you: false starts, repeated points, explanations you needed and the reader does not. The draft is the record of your thinking. The finished piece is the result of it, and the result is shorter.

A useful target, in our experience, is a third. It is not a law, and some drafts need less while others need more. But aiming to remove roughly one word in three forces decisions that gentler trimming avoids. Here is a way to approach it that works from the largest units down to the smallest.

Why a third

Small targets invite small cuts. If you set out to trim a five-thousand-word draft by a few hundred words, you will find them in adverbs and doubled phrases, and the piece will be tidier but no different. A third cannot be found that way. It forces you to ask whether whole sections earn their place, and that is the question most drafts need.

A clear number also helps with the emotional part of cutting, which is the hard part. It is easier to remove a paragraph you are fond of when you have a target to reach than when you are only asking whether the paragraph is good. Most paragraphs in a draft are good enough. The question is whether the piece is better without them.

Cut from the top down

Begin with structure, not sentences. Polishing a paragraph you later delete is the most common waste of an editing afternoon. Work in this order:

1. Sections. List each section in a line or two. Look for two that make the same point, one that belongs to a different piece, and one that exists only because you found the material interesting.
2. Paragraphs. Within each section that survives, ask what each paragraph adds that the others do not.
3. Sentences and words. Only now, and only in the paragraphs you are keeping.

Structural cuts usually account for most of the third. If a draft has six sections and two of them can go, you may be close to your target before you touch a single sentence.

Paragraph by paragraph

At the paragraph level, a few kinds of writing are worth looking for first, because they are common in drafts and rarely missed when removed:

• The warm-up. Opening paragraphs that set the scene before the piece begins. The first real paragraph is often the second or third, as we discuss in Writing an opening paragraph that earns the next.
• The recap. Paragraphs that remind the reader of what they have just read. In a piece meant to be read in one sitting, readers usually remember.
• The second example. When one example has made the point well, a second one often only repeats it. Keep the stronger.
• The defence. Paragraphs that answer objections nobody has raised. A brief acknowledgement of a real counter-argument helps; a long pre-emptive defence makes the writer sound anxious.

Sentence by sentence

Once the structure is settled, line editing finds the rest. Most of what can go at this level falls into familiar patterns: hedges (“perhaps”, “in a sense”, “it could be argued”), throat-clearing (“it is worth noting that”), intensifiers that weaken (“very”, “really”, “quite”) and pairs where one word would do (“each and every”, “first and foremost”).

Do not try to remove all of these. Voice lives partly in them, and a piece stripped of every qualification can sound brusque. Remove the ones you would not miss if you read the sentence aloud. Reading aloud is the best test we know at this level: the ear catches padding that the eye forgives.

What not to cut

Cutting has its own failure mode, and it is worth guarding against. A piece edited too hard loses the things that make it worth reading. Be slow to remove:

• Concrete detail. The name of a street, the colour of a coat, the exact words someone used. These look decorative but are what readers remember and believe.
• Transitions that carry logic. A sentence that explains why the next section follows from this one may look like connective tissue, but without it the reader has to do the work.
• The turn. In an essay, the moment where understanding shifts is the reason the piece exists. If cutting has made it abrupt, restore some of what led up to it.
• Your voice. A wry aside or a short, plain sentence after a long one may be inefficient, and also the reason a reader stays.

Keep a cuttings file

The simplest way to make cutting painless is to make it reversible. Keep a separate document, one per piece, and paste everything you remove into it with a line noting where it came from. You will rarely put anything back, but knowing you could makes it far easier to cut boldly.

The cuttings file has a second use. Over time, it collects the material that belonged to a different piece: the digression that was too interesting to keep, the section that answered another question. More than one essay starts life as something cut from another. If you keep notes on your subjects, as we suggest in Finding the subject only you can write, the cuttings file is a good place to look when the next one needs beginning.

One last check before you publish: read the shortened piece in one sitting, at the pace a reader would. Long stories on this site gain a table of contents drawn from their headings, as the features page notes, so look at your headings as a list too. If they still tell the shape of the argument in a few lines, the cut has worked.