20 Jun 2021

It’s 10:59pm on a Sunday night and you’re zooming through paragraphs to get your essay sent off to your teacher before midnight. It’s taken you five hours, two powerades, a bag of Smith's Original chips, three Rihanna albums and you’re just about finishing off the conclusion. 

You look down to the bottom of your page. You’ve gone 400 words over the limit. Alright, well, they did said 10% leeway was okay... but this is a 1,000 word assignment. You’ve still got to cut it down 300 words. Damn Rihanna, why didn’t you prepare me for this moment? 

 

Now, this is going to feel like you’re back in primary school, learning sentence structure basics but if I don’t pull you up on this now, who’s going to stop you from deleting a whole paragraph just to get down to the word limit?

1. Eliminate excessive describing words

Get straight to the point. Sure, describing words help make ya look smart but writing the same word three times (you’ve typed in ‘synonyms’ next to the word in your Google Search and plopped in the first result) just takes up space. Do yourself a favour, proofread and remove those unnecessary synonyms! 

2. This also goes for adverbs + adjectives

Good words do not need adverbs and will not make your writing stronger or more concise. It adds clutter! For example:

Original: The excited dog decided to jump over the fence and go for a massive dip in the pool.
Revised: The dog decided to jump over the fence and go for a dip in the pool.

Anyway, it's not the most amazing example but you get the idea!

3. Erase the classic paragraph starters

You know what I’m talking about. 

On the other hand, conversely, additionally, nonetheless, however, alternatively, juxtapositionally, in contrast. 

Nope. Scrap them all! If your point is convincing as it needs to be, you don’t need any of this. I generally integrated a sentence before my closing sentence of the paragraph prior for any opposing views or related evidence to lead into the next paragraph. TLDR; they’re unwanted and a waste of an introduction!

4. Get rid of those long, pesky quotes

These can be cut out completely, unless absolutely essential to proving your point. Or, you could shorten quotes using ellipses, grabbing the most important parts, keeping it structurally correct and without taking the text out of context.

Sometimes it depends on your type of referencing, so suss it because you could be saving yourself a hefty number of words.

5. Trim wordy sentences down

Cull down your clutter, such as words or lengthy phrases that you think you can shorten. This is probably your number one culprit and once you get the hang of this one, you’re aces. Take a look below:

Original: During the course of my university degree, the majority of my cohort dropped out due to extremely hard and intense assignments they were given.
Word count: 23 words

Revised: During university, most students dropped out after they received intense assignments.
Word count: 11 words

I know on the surface that these tips look like they won’t change your work dramatically but trust me, when you go through and chop out all the above, you’ll end up at your word limit. Get out your highlighter, prepare for some backspacing and give them a go!