Editing, Succinctness, and Dealing with Jargon/Making your sentences succinct

Making Your Sentences Succinct

The simplest way of ensuring your sentences are as succinct as possible is to make sure every single word counts. You can do this by seeing whether each sentence would have the same meaning if certain words were removed. For example, in the first sentence in this paragraph, you could remove ‘single’ and it would mean the same thing. This might not seem that important in this example, but over the course of a long piece of writing, you will be surprised by how many words you can remove.

The second thing you should do when editing your work to make it more succinct is to check the transition words and phrases that link all of the different sentences together. There is an art to this, because these transitions are critical to making sure your writing reads well and follows a logical path. However, if there are simpler, more succinct alternatives to the transitions you have used, it would be a wise idea to change them. For example, why say “Despite the fact that,” when you could simply say “Despite…”