Bryan Garner offers four tips for trimming extra words in his chapter “Waste no Words” in his HBR Guide to Better Business Writing.

They include, when possible:

• Deleting prepositions
• Replacing nouns ending with -ion with verbs
• Replacing forms of the verb “to be” with stronger verbs, as I discuss in The “Be” test for writers and Test your financial editing skill with these examples
• Eliminating “padding” such as “in this connection it might be observed that”

For examples of how to trim extra words, see my posts on Word and phrase substitutions for economical writers and More substitutions for economical writers. 

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The image in the upper left is courtesy of Biswarup Ganguly  [CC BY 3.0]