The Savvy Academic by Seth J. Schwartz

Author:Seth J. Schwartz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2021-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Tips for Cutting Length

Toward the end of the editing phase, you may find yourself in a position where you are over the journal’s space limit and you need to reduce length. Here I offer several tips for cutting length from a paper. The tips are somewhat different depending on whether you are dealing with a word limit or a page limit.

The most general tip I can offer is to be as economical as possible with words. I can remember a manuscript many years ago where a reviewer advised me to “be more pithy.” I had to look the word up, but pithy essentially means economical with words. Rather than saying “The current investigation involved recruiting a sample of 200 young adults,” we could say “We recruited 200 young adults.” For those writers with more verbose writing styles, being pithy can require self-discipline—not necessarily on the first draft, but while you are editing and sharpening the draft. Look for longer, more flowery sentences and cut them back to the most essential message. Remove clauses that are not necessary to make your points. And active voice tends to require fewer words than passive voice does; for example, “We recruited 250 participants” is four words, whereas “Two hundred fifty participants were recruited” is six words. (Remember that we cannot start a sentence with a number written in numerical form—a number must be written as a word if it is the first word in the sentence.)

Take a look at the following sentence:

The current results illustrate the value of developing measures that assess the whole of childhood, from the earliest days of infancy through the time when adolescents finish high school.

A pithier way of writing this sentence might be:

Our findings suggest that measures need to be developed to assess children from infancy through adolescence.

Sometimes, rephrasing can allow us to cut out a couple of words. For example:

Original: Our results may have important implications for the development of interventions.

Rephrased: Our results may have important implications for intervention development.

Original: Journals are often delayed in the publication of accepted manuscripts.

Rephrased: Journals are often delayed in publishing accepted manuscripts.

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