A Tip on Condensing Your Writing

I have a lot of trouble with writing concisely and though this method takes some time, it’ll help in the long run with knowing what information to include in your writing.

You will need:

• Writing equipment
• A highlighter

Let’s take this waffle I wrote in psychology class:

And this is what happens when I highlight it:

That’s 10/51 words.

The common mistake people make is to do this:

That’s 32/51 words, which is 21 words more and also an eyesore. The problem with this is that it still contains the waffle and also the structure which could be changed to reduce the word count.

This can be done by doing as follows:

• Not highlighting anything which is already in the title of the text
• Not highlighting words such as “the” and “and” and so on
• Highlighting important words instead of phrases because “you might as well”
• Since you’ve already written it, you are familiar with the material so you don’t need to highlight words which mean the same thing
• Not highlighting a word twice

After doing this, rewrite your piece of text:

This skill could also be used to avoid plagiarism by highlighting important information. So, copying but only using the facts.

I hope this helped you as much as it helped me!