Most journals, and even dissertation and thesis guidelines, have word limits in place to ensure that papers are digestible. However, good academic writing needs to be concise not just to meet those limits but also to ensure that readers can understand the complex topic at hand, and that your argument is coherent and not muddied by lots of extraneous information. Removing unnecessary words and complicated phrases will make your writing much stronger. This post offers some ways in which you can tighten up your writing to produce clearer content and more easily adhere to word count restrictions.

Remove inflated phrases

An inflated phrase is one that uses more words than necessary to convey the sense and idea. Inflated phrases can add many words to your writing, so removing them can reduce your word count significantly. Here are some examples:

   Inflated: This paper seeks to examine…

   Concise: This paper examines… (note that this is also more accurate, since the paper actually does examine the issue in question, rather than just seeking to do so).

   Inflated: …were of the opinion…

   Concise: …stated…

Once you start to identify inflated phrases, you will start to notice them everywhere. These phrases can be easily replaced by shorter ones that will save you some valuable writing space.

Avoid passive voice

Avoiding passive voice in your writing as much as possible will make your sentences more concise and clearer. This does not mean passive voice is wrong—passive voice is often necessary and helpful, particularly in scientific writing, and in fact there are occasions when passive voice makes for a clearer sentence than active voice. Using the passive voice too often, however, can make your writing unnecessarily wordy and difficult to understand.

   Passive: The interviews were conducted by three trained researchers.

   Active: Three trained researchers conducted the interviews.

   Passive: New findings were revealed by the study.

   Active: The study revealed new findings.

Remove redundancies

Text is redundant when it expresses the same idea twice. This often happens when you use words or phrases where the meaning of one of the words is already implied in the other. For example, cooperation implies working together, so the phrase “cooperating together” suffers from redundancy and you could simply use “cooperate.”

Here are two more examples:

   Redundant: In addition, we also conducted surveys.

   Concise: In addition, we conducted surveys. (Or: We also conducted surveys.)

   Redundant: We reviewed literature by knowledgeable experts in the field of management.

   Concise: We reviewed literature by experts in the field of management.

Make sure each word is necessary

If you need to cut some words, look at each part of your sentence. Is it necessary? Does it enhance your writing? Long sentences are good candidates for revision. They often contain many extra words that do not contribute to the overall meaning.

   Unnecessarily Long: Based on the results of the survey, we came to the conclusion of that most of the employees preferred working in the office rather than working from home.

   Concise: The survey results revealed that most employees preferred working from the office rather than from home.

Hopefully, these tips will enable you to stick to your word count and become a better writer. However, there are times when your draft is so far over the word limit that cutting it down sufficiently feels like an impossible task. That’s where we can take an objective view and help you meet even the tightest word limit. In fact, we relish the challenge of word count reductions and would love to help you!