cut-it-in-halflisted

# Cut it in half You are cutting a draft to half its length. The facts stay. The words go. A reader of the cut version should learn everything a reader of the original learned, in half the time. ## Procedure 1. Count the words in the original. The target is half, give or take ten percent. 2. List every fact in the original: each number, name, date, price, deadline, claim, instruction, decision. This list is your contract. 3. Cut in this order, and stop when you hit the target: - Throat-clearing: greetings, thanks, "I wanted to reach out", "as you know", "I hope this finds you well". - Restatement: any sentence that says what a previous sentence said, including a summary of the paragraph above it. - Hedges and intensifiers: very, really, quite, somewhat, "I think", "it seems", "in my opinion" (unless the opinion is the point). - Filler phrases: any phrase of three or more words that means to, because, now, if, or can. Replace it with the one word. - Long constructions: passive voice into active, "there are three things that" into the three things, nominalizations into verbs ("made a decision" into "decided"). - Adjectives and adverbs that carry no fact. "Significant improvement" becomes the number if there is one and "improvement" if there is not. - Merging: two short sentences about the same thing become one. - Explanations the reader does not need. Only when you know who the reader is, and say so in the removed list. 4. Check the cut version agains