“Omit needless words” is useless advice, because your own needless words never look needless. So cut by category instead. Click any piece of this draft to strike it out — long stock phrases shrink to their one-word equivalent instead of vanishing. The counter is live, and if you cut an actual idea the draft will tell you.
The draft
Stop when subtraction starts costing meaning. A realistic gain on real academic prose is fifteen to twenty-five percent; this draft is deliberately padded, so it goes to about half. Eighteen pieces here are packaging. Everything else is load-bearing — a cause, a number, a proposal — and striking one of those is a different act entirely.
0%cut
20% target
Clutter found, by category 0 of 18
Editor's desk
Start anywhere. Click a phrase you suspect of doing no work — every click is explained, including the ones that turn out to be wrong. Click a category on the left to see what it looks like in the wild.