Tag: Concision

If a journal caps your abstract at 250 words and yours is running at 290, you don’t need to say less. You need to say the same thing in fewer words. That’s the whole skill, and it’s more mechanical than it sounds: most wordiness comes from a handful of repeatable habits, and once you can spot them, cutting a sentence by 20% takes seconds.

Here’s the one-line version, worth repeating to a labmate: if you can delete a word and the sentence still means exactly the same thing, delete it. Not “if it sounds better” — if the meaning survives. That test is stricter than it looks, and it’s the difference between trimming and rewriting.

The three places wordiness actually hides

You’ve probably done all three of these without noticing, because each one feels like normal academic phrasing while you’re typing it.

1. “There is/are … that” constructions

This pattern adds a subject and a verb before the sentence has said anything yet.

Before: “There are several studies that suggest a link between sleep deprivation and impaired glucose tolerance.”
After: “Several studies suggest a link between sleep deprivation and impaired glucose tolerance.”

Three words gone, nothing lost. “There are … that” almost never survives contact with this test, because “there are” isn’t doing any work — the real subject is sitting three words later, waiting.

2. Words that repeat a meaning already in the sentence

This one is sneakier, because each word looks like it’s adding precision when it’s actually adding nothing.

• “Possibly could” — “could” already carries the uncertainty. Cut “possibly.”
• “About 15–20 participants” — a range already means “about.” Cut “about.”
• “Very critical” — “critical” is already at the top of the scale. “Very” doesn’t push it further; it just sits there.

The test again: does removing the word change what the sentence claims? If a reviewer would understand the same thing either way, it’s redundant, not emphatic.

3. Wordy phrases standing in for a single conjunction

“Due to the fact that” and “based on the fact that” are two of the most common phrases we see across the papers that come through Uni-edit’s editing desk, almost always where “because” or “since” would do the job in one word instead of four or five.

Before: “Due to the fact that sample sizes were small, statistical power was limited.”
After: “Because sample sizes were small, statistical power was limited.”

Same claim, same hedge, four fewer words — and it reads like something a person would actually say, which is worth more than it sounds.

Try it: cut this sentence by four words

Here’s the practice sentence Uni-edit’s own writing tip opens with. Twenty-one words, and it’s carrying at least four that aren’t doing anything:

“There are several reports that possibly suggest that a slight reduction in sugar intake could possibly extend one’s lifespan by about 1-3 years.”

Run all three checks on it before you scroll past this line. Then compare:

“Several reports suggest that a slight reduction in sugar intake could extend one’s lifespan by 1-3 years.”

“There are” and its trailing “that” are gone (rule 1). Both “possibly”s are gone, because “suggest” and “could” already hedge the claim (rule 2). “About” is gone, because “1-3 years” is already a range (rule 2 again). Same sentence, same caveats, five words lighter — one more than the original challenge asks for, which is exactly the point: once you can see the pattern, you tend to overshoot the target rather than miss it.

Why this matters more than it seems to

Word limits aren’t a formatting nuisance — they’re a proxy for how well you can prioritise your own argument. An abstract that’s 40 words over isn’t usually saying 40 words more; it’s saying the same thing with 40 words of static in it. A reviewer notices the static before they notice the finding.

You can read the full Writing Tip 9: Reducing Wordiness for the source version of these three rules. And if you’re staring at a manuscript that’s over the limit and can’t tell anymore which words are load-bearing and which are static — that’s exactly the judgement call a second pair of eyes is good for, which is what Level 3 editing does alongside the grammar pass.

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