Half of writing is editing

We often forget, when giving students feedback about their academic writing, that EDITING is a huge part of the writing job. Maybe half of our time is spent editing (Luke, 2019): gaining clarity in meaning, reorganising paragraphs, and trimming the fat. Most writing benefits from a thorough prune and proof: not least our titles, our doubles ("x and y"), our triplets ("x, y and z"), our lead-ins, our bridges, and our quotes repeated via contextualisation. 

For myself, I write what I want to say, talk all around the place until I finally get to the point. THEN I have to go back and hack away the extraneous waffle so the reader can see what it is that I am actually trying to say. And to my shame, it is often only when my posts go live that I see the trailing edits and sentence fragments I have left as trip hazards dotted along the reader's path :-(

So I thought I would share some resources to aid editing. 

When writing academically, we must not give our power away (read more here) by leading with the author. Because we tend to write from notes using this laundry list method ("X says, Y says"; Thomson, 2017), we need to edit, turning our sentences around so we lead with the main idea, and end with the author/source. 

The University of Canterbury has a great pdf with a whole load of tips on trimming our writing here (Weiss, 2025). The pdf contains some common examples of how we write long but can reorganise short. Then the University of Swansea has a page of tips on chopping chunks out of our writing here (2026) which ends with an example showing how 110 words can be shortened to 76 without losing meaning. More active and compressing-style writing tips can be found here (Iesipovych, 2025), with a number of short single sentence length-reduction examples. 

There are websites to paste in a paragraph of our text, returning suggestions for shortening or clarifying our meaning, such as UsePhrased (2026): https://usephrased.com/text-shortener. I have tried this and it does a fair job. However, we cannot use this verbatim for academic writing as it (a) scrubs off all the references, and (b) it is likely to be using an AI in the background, meaning our writing will be pinged when it goes through a plagiarism checker. We are better to use this type of tool to generate ideas for isolated, problematic areas, then put the site's reordering suggestions into our own words. 

My blog also has a few other posts on editing and word count here with some student examples that might assist.

Sam

References:

Luke, A. (2019, November 18). How Much Time Should You Spend Drafting vs Editing?. Aliventures. https://www.aliventures.com/drafting-vs-editing-time/

Iesipovych, I. (2025, November 22). Compression Strategies: Cutting Word Count Without Losing Meaning. Lingo Harvest.  https://lingoharvest.com/english/grammar/advanced/458-compression-strategies-word-count.html

Thomson, P. (2017, September 11). Avoiding the laundry list literature review. https://patthomson.net/2017/09/11/avoiding-the-laundry-list-literature-review/

University of Swansea. (2026). Reducing Your Word Count!. https://www.swansea.ac.uk/academic-success/academic-skills-lab/academic_writing_articles/word-count/reduce-word-count/

UsePhrased. (2026). Free Text Shortener. https://usephrased.com/text-shortener

Weiss, M. (2025). Lower your word count. University of Canterbury. https://www.canterbury.ac.nz/content/dam/uoc-main-site/documents/pdfs/d-other/Lower%20your%20word%20count.pdf