Concise Writing: How to Find and Cut Every Word You Don't Need

It’s not always better to remove “extra” words. When you’re writing dialogue, or any time you’re writing in a character’s voice, you don’t want to sacrifice that voice for the principle of conciseness. Not every -ly adverb must or should come out. There are other factors to consider, like the rhythm of the text, varying sentence lengths and structures, distinct nuances of meaning, and avoiding repetition of the same word. This blog is not a how-to guide for condensing every phrase that can be; instead, it’s a guide on finding those instances so you can decide whether to edit them.

Action or Adjective Modifiers

This is where writing advisers beat the dead horse and tell you to never use adverbs. What people mean when they say “never use adverbs,” as far as I can tell, is “don’t use an adverb to modify a verb or an adjective when a more specific verb would mean the same thing.” That’s it. There are all kinds of adverbs that people aren’t thinking of when they give that advice, like here, there, however—however, that’s neither here nor there.

If you’re using an adverb to describe how an action happened; or to describe the degree of an adjective; or to intensify, amplify, or downplay something; then that adverb and whatever it is modifying can likely be replaced by a single, more-descriptive word.

For example:

• She was very mad. → She was furious.

• He quickly ran to class. → He sprinted to class.

• They were extremely beautiful. → They were gorgeous.

• The sun is awfully bright. → The sun is blazing.

• The crowd congregated aimlessly around the parking lot. → The crowd milled around the parking lot.

When I said, in the subtitle of today’s essay, “two when one will do,” this is the type of phrase I was thinking of—the word you want to use to describe a thing or an action (so, an adjective or a verb) and then another word (an adverb) to describe the manner or degree of the thing or action. Writing not only becomes more concise when you replace these, but also more vivid.

These are the kinds of phrases Grammarly and Hemingway App are great at spotting and warning you about. If you tend to use a lot of complex verb and adjective phrases like these, you can try dumping your text into one of those apps so it will highlight your modifiers for you and you can determine whether you want to replace them, and with what.

To be clear, there’s a place for these types of modifiers. It’s lazy writing advice to tell someone “just get rid of all of them.” Use them judiciously and with intent. Remove those that don’t serve you.

Common Verb Phrases and Their Betters

For instance, “Can you tell me how to get to Sesame Street?” would be better as “Can you direct me to Sesame Street?” but nobody asked my opinion on this, probably because I was negative twelve when it was written.

Whenever you see prepositions (“to,” “at,” “about”) floating around a verb, that’s a sign to look again. Many of these preposition-plus-verb phrases can be condensed into a better word. For example, “have to” can often be expressed as “must”:

• All students have to go to class.

• All students must go to class.

But wait, that statement also uses “go to.” “Go to” can often be condensed, but what it’s condensed to depends upon context:

• All students must go to class.

• All students must attend class.

What if I said: “All students must go to class on time”? In this case, you can’t change “go to” to “attend” because the thing they must (or have to) do is no longer attend, but arrive on time. You could still condense “on time,” though:

• All students must arrive punctually.

How about “like to,” as in, “we like to go to the movies”?

• We like to go to the movies.

• We enjoy going to the movies.

Oops, I did it again. It still contains the phrase “go[ing] to the movies.”

• We enjoy going to the movies.

• We enjoy watching movies.

In this latest example, however, I’ve changed the meaning of the sentence. Going to the movies and watching movies aren’t the same thing. Watching movies is part of what you do when you go to the movies, but it isn’t the sum total of what you do or what you enjoy (ostensibly): Part of your enjoyment might also come from getting out of the house, movie theater popcorn and snacks, the really big screen, the loud sound, the theater seating, and so on.

Another one that comes to mind is “look at.” “Look at” can often be replaced by a better verb, but the one you replace it with depends on context.

• Let’s look at these phrases. → Let’s examine these phrases.

• We’ll look at what happens when we change them. → We’ll observe what happens when we change them.

• We go to the zoo to look at animals. → We go to the zoo to watch animals.

You probably don’t go to the zoo to examine animals (unless you’re a veterinarian) and you probably don’t watch phrases (they’re not doing anything!). Observe would work in all three sentences, though.

Yet another is “think about”; you can replace it with contemplate, consider, mull, ruminate, speculate, reflect, muse, entertain, ponder—the list goes on. It depends on what you actually mean.

This is why it’s so important to consider context when condensing text; you can’t follow a checklist for this kind of thing. You have to consider how each edit changes (or doesn’t change) your original meaning. Products like Hemingway Editor and Grammarly can make suggestions based on complex ruleset (it’s actually not that complex) but they can’t see into your mind to determine whether the edit they’re suggesting preserves your original meaning with all its shades and nuances.

The Unnecessary and Redundant

Sometimes we put unnecessary text into writing as flavor text, and that’s fine. Sometimes we put unnecessary phrases into writing because we’re not sure how to start the sentence (or the paragraph, the email, the idea, whatever) and so we lean on these redundant phrases to get us started. As I said at the start of this article, sometimes there’s text we (the writers) need but our audience or recipient doesn’t need. The trick, again, is to backtrack and remove what isn’t needful.

I’m guilty of using “I think” when I write. I’m usually using in intentionally, and to signal that whatever I’m saying in that moment isn’t coming from a place of authority or isn’t universal, it’s just my own personal belief or take on whatever I’m writing about. But there’s actually never any need for me to write “I think.” Everything in this blog is what I think. I don’t need to tell you it’s what I think. You already know. Because it came out of my brain (the place where I think thoughts).

Another redundancy I see a lot is “I’m writing this email because” (or this letter, or whatever communication it is). The recipient of your email knows you’re writing an email. They know because they got your email.

• No: I’m writing to find out if you can meet to discuss widgets at noon on Thursday.

• Yes: Can you meet Thursday at noon to discuss widgets?

Likewise, if you’re querying an agent “I’m writing this query to find out if you’re interested in….” They definitely know why you’re writing.

These are filler phrases, and there’s a multitude of filler words and filler phrases in English that we tend to put into our writing (again, all kinds of writing) that just don’t need to be there. I’m perhaps the most guilty party. I throw literally into sentences liberally, I throw out “so”s and “basically”s and “anyway”s and “all this to say”s like there’s no tomorrow. Everybody’s got to start somewhere on the succinctness spectrum.