Cutting a Draft in Half

Why first drafts are long

Because writing and thinking happen simultaneously, and the record of the thinking ends up in the document.

You work out what you mean by writing three versions of it, and all three are still there.

You warm up for two paragraphs before reaching the point, which is a normal part of getting started and no part of the finished piece.

None of that is bad writing. It is the debris of composition, and the edit is the job of removing it rather than a judgement on the draft.

Cutting is not polishing

Most people editing their own work rewrite sentences: better words, smoother transitions, a stronger verb.

That is polishing, it takes a long time, and it improves a piece marginally.

Cutting removes whole sentences, paragraphs, and sections. It takes twenty minutes and improves a piece substantially.

Do the cutting first, because a great deal of what you would have carefully polished is about to be deleted, and polishing it first makes it harder to delete.

The first thing to delete

The opening, usually the first two paragraphs, and often the first three.

Almost every draft begins with context explaining why the subject matters, and the reader arrived because it already matters to them.

Find the first sentence that says something specific and start there. The material above it was you getting up to speed.

This one habit accounts for a large share of the improvement available, and it feels wrong every time, because the deleted paragraphs are often perfectly well written.

What comes out next

• Restatements: the same point made again in different words.
• Qualifiers: quite, rather, generally, somewhat, fairly.
• Throat-clearing: it is worth noting that, it should be said.
• Signposting that describes structure rather than content.
• Background the reader already has.
• The summary paragraph that repeats what was just said.

The second category removes the most words for the least loss. A qualifier is usually a hedge against a claim you should either make or drop.

Read it aloud

The most effective test available and the one people skip because it feels foolish.

Anywhere you stumble, run out of breath, or have to reread a clause is a problem in the writing rather than in your reading.

Long sentences reveal themselves immediately. So do phrases that look reasonable and turn out to be unsayable, which are common in professional writing.

It takes about the length of the piece, it requires nothing, and it catches more than any amount of silent rereading.

A worked example

A consultant's draft about choosing between two approaches ran to nineteen hundred words.

The first three paragraphs explained why the decision was important, which the reader knew, since nobody arrives at that page casually.

Two sections covered the same ground from different angles because they had been written a week apart.

A closing summary restated the four points immediately after making them.

Cutting those, with no rewriting at all, produced eleven hundred words.

Reading it aloud found eight sentences that could not be said in one breath, which were split.

The finished piece was around a thousand words, took forty minutes to edit, and was better in every respect than the version that had taken three hours to write.

The forty percent rule

As a working target, expect to lose about forty percent of a first draft.

That figure is useful precisely because it is uncomfortable. It gives you permission to delete aggressively rather than defending each sentence individually.

If you cut ten percent you have tidied. If you cut forty you have edited.

Where a draft genuinely cannot lose that much, it is usually because it was written from a clear outline, which is the other way to arrive at the same place.

Save what you cut

Not in the document, but in a separate file.

Two practical reasons. Deleting is much easier when it is not permanent, and reluctance to delete is mostly reluctance to lose something.

And the cut material is frequently the start of another piece. The section that did not belong is often a subject in its own right, and a paragraph on a tangent is sometimes the best thing in the draft.

A file of offcuts becomes a surprisingly good source of topics after a year.

Leave a day if you can

Editing immediately after writing is the hardest version of the job, because you still remember what you meant and read it into sentences that do not say it.

A day is enough for that to fade. Two is better.

Where the schedule does not allow it, the substitutes are reading aloud, changing the font, or reading it on a different device, all of which disrupt the familiarity enough to help a little.

None of them work as well as time, which is one argument for writing in batches rather than on the day of publication.

Cutting something you did not write

Editing a colleague's draft is the same mechanical job with a social problem attached, and the social problem is what makes people polish instead of cut.

Say what you are doing before you start. An edit that arrives unannounced with forty percent removed reads as a verdict on the writing, which it is not.

Cut on a copy and keep the original, so the conversation is about two versions rather than about damage.

Give reasons that point at the reader instead of the sentence. This section repeats the one above it is a fact about the draft; this section is weak is an opinion about the writer.

And leave the arguable cuts in as suggestions rather than deleting them outright. The clear ones, warm-up paragraphs, restatements, and stray qualifiers, are rarely defended by anybody once they are pointed out.

The counter-case

Cutting can be taken too far, and the failure mode is real.

A piece reduced to pure assertion, with every example, qualification, and worked case removed, is shorter and less convincing, because the removed material was the evidence.

Genuine hedging also has a place. Where something depends on circumstances, saying so is accuracy rather than throat-clearing, and deleting it produces a confident sentence that is wrong.

The test is what a sentence does for the reader. Examples, exceptions, and honest caveats earn their space. Restatement, warm-up, and hedging against a claim you are unwilling to make do not.

The edit

1. Leave it a day where possible.
2. Delete the opening until the first specific sentence.
3. Remove restatements and the closing summary.
4. Strip every qualifier and put back only the ones that are true.
5. Read it aloud and fix whatever you stumble on.
6. Check you kept the examples and the exceptions.
7. Keep the offcuts in a separate file.

Forty minutes, and it does more for a piece than another three hours of writing would.

Compression at the extreme is covered in saying what you do in six words.

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