More, but shorter: Getting your word count under control
Photo by Anthony Jauneaud.
Anyone who has ever worked as a journalist—or really, any kind of professional writer—has certainly contended with the seemingly contradictory request: “Please add X, Y, and Z, but also make it shorter.” Writing is hard, but writing to a word limit is harder still, and it takes a lot of experience to whittle copy down without losing its value.
I won’t lie to you and say that I can convey my secrets to cutting down copy in one article, but I can share with you a few tips and tricks that I’ve learned over the years:
Lose the adverbs: Just delete them. You almost never need them if you can find a better verb. My favorite ones to cut are the ones that seem to add scale, but really don’t—is very disappointed more disappointed than disappointed?
Cut the verb parade: Nonprofits tend to string verbs together like, “the League planned, strategized, built, tested, piloted, and launched the project." Again, one good verb will do.
Get rid of “distancing” words: For me, “distancing” words are unnecessary ones that literally create distance between the subject and verb, as in “We are working to align to restore wetlands” and not “we are restoring wetlands.”
Remove doubles: Find sentences that say the same thing or almost the same thing and combine them.
Cut the jargon: Nonprofit jargon not only spins readers' heads, but it also takes up a lot of space. Hard to imagine you can't come up with a shorter version of "we are designing and establishing a consensus process to articulate key learnings to reinforce best practices in a multi-layered strategic matrix."
Shorter quotes: Quotes are best when they're two sentences, a set-up and a conclusion. Cut down any quote that's longer than that.
Use active voice: “The League’s efforts” uses fewer words than “the efforts of the League” and it sounds better.
Watch your granularity: A lot of times you’re taking up several sentences to share a level of detail that no one really needs.
Kill your darlings: This is an old writers’ saying for the act of getting rid of some treasured turn of phrase or section that you're laboring to include, but in all honesty, you’d be better off cutting. If it’s that much work to get right, it probably doesn’t belong.
The hungry paragraph eater: Many of these tips will only buy you a few words, but if you’re going to cut something from 700 to 400 words, you need to be more aggressive. And that’s going to mean finding a paragraph and eating it. My method for this is to cut-and-paste a candidate to the bottom of the page, and then I see if I can sprinkle bits of it around the piece in much shorter form. And then, when I get to the end, I ask myself if I still need it; I always don’t. High five, word count reached.
As I said, these are just a few ideas. I’d love to hear your own suggestions.