… you're trying to write a 5000 word conference paper (due on Friday) and the results section is almost the word limit:
Yup. I'm screwed.
(Not to mention that I'm procrastinating by writing a blog post about how screwed I am for Friday. Oh, the irony.)
Check out Gerald. M. Weinberg’s book on writing. One of his exercises (if I remember correctly) is to
step 1: delete 1 word in every sentence that’s 10 (?) words or longer.
step 2: delete 1 sentence from every paragraph that 5 (?) sentences or longer.
step 3: delete 1 paragraph from every 10 paragraphs.
rewriting as necessary to make sense.
“Weinberg on Writing: The Fieldstone Method”
It works very well. This is pretty much what Heinlein did to reduce the word-count of “Stranger In A Strange Land” by 50% without removing a single scene or plot-point.
Hi Keith!
Thanks for the tips. That worked well.
I also found writing one or two words to summarise each paragraph in the margin very helpful. I could then see where I was repeating myself and start to combine redundant paragraphs.
I’m now down to 2916 words.