Lean and Tight: How to Cut Word Count

Here’s another way our formal education broke our writing. Most essay assignments had minimum lengths (pages for us oldsters, word count for the younger among us), meaning we build the reflex of writing long. 

Although a very few books and drafts are underwritten and overly thin, much more often books tend to be bloated, saggy, and overwritten. That means there’s a good chance your book could stand to cut a few words out.

A lot of the time you can do that by instinct with a quick rewrite for brevity, but if you need to pare down even more run through this checklist.