rewritign: We’ve all been there before. Staying up into the early hours of the morning, tryin

rewritign:

_{We’ve all been there before. Staying up into the early hours of the morning, trying to complete that essay you’ve left until the night before it’s due, you reach that euphoric moment of completion, only to glance at the word count and be bombarded with anguish. Somehow in your haze of  too much caffeine, 3am tears, and zero cares, you have to cut out a chunk of your essay to reach the word limit. Have no fear! Here are a few simple tricks to reducing your word count so you can meet that dastardly word limit without having to rewrite whole sections of your essay.} 

Plan and structure your essay before writing it
_{Pre-planning and structuring your essay will not only give your essay a clear voice and a more coherent argument, it can also help in reducing your word count before you start writing! Spending 15 minutes creating an essay plan will ensure you address your argument’s main points without straying and writing about irrelevant ideas. You could even set yourself a word limit for each paragraph depending on it’s content and significance to your argument.} 

Use gerunds
_{Gerunds,-ing verbs,are an easy way to reduce your word count, simply by rewriting a few sentences to remove unnecessary words. Consider the following:}

_{He ran towards the car andquickly gulped down his coffee. (10 words)
Runningtowards the car, he quickly gulped down his coffee. (9 words)}

Delete adverbs
_{Using adverbs can, at times, be an insult to the reader, and adds unnecessary words to an essay. The redundancy of those (majority) -ly verb modifiers can be trying. When I’ve finished an essay, I alwaysctrl+fsearch-ly and decide which ones need the cut. Let’s look at that example again:}

_{Running towards the car, he quicklygulped down his coffee. (9 words)
Running towards the car, he gulped down his coffee. (8 words)}

_{By definition, the act of gulping is to swallow quickly. Why waste your precious word count for an unneeded word? Alternatively, write actively by removing an adverbandreplacing it with another verb!}

_{The window shook loudly. (4 words)
The window rattled. (3 words)}

_{Keep in mind some adverbs may be necessaryif they provide important information!}

Delete ‘that’
_{I had a family member who refused to read over any of my work until I had gone through and deleted every unnecessary ‘that’ I could find. Often, it’s such a superfluousword that you could almost strike it from the English language. Now reread the previous sentence without ‘that’. You’ll be surprised how often you use it!. Ensure you read the sentence you’re removing the word from; it’s not always useless!} 

Delete auxiliary verbs
_{I’ll admit to finding this difficult, deleting ‘can’, ‘could’, ‘might’, ‘should’, and the like. Deleting these unnecessary verbsbothreduces word count and also gives your writing more strengthandauthority! While useful for expressing tentativeness, you shouldn’t be tentative in arguing your point. For example:}

_{Manymay have been negatively impacted by the Great Depression. (10 words)
Manywere negatively impacted by the Great Depression. (8 words)}

Replace phrases with words
_{Some phrases become fixed in our writing, using long strings of words instead of simply one. There’s no set rule for this, it just comes with reading through your work. Googlecan be your friend here!}

_{On the other hand… (4 words)
Conversely…(1 word)}

_{These are the ways I most commonly use to lower my word count, but there are definitely a lot more out there! Hopefully they can help you too! Feel free to messageme if you’d like!}