There’s Not Enough Room! 6 Tips to Edit Shorter Without Cutting Content

4. To avoid repeating words or phrases, use lists and link sentences together.

Original sentence:

A quarter of program participants are black, while 36% of program participants are Latinx. Another 12% of participants are Asian, and the remaining 27% are white. Over half (57%) of participants are single parents.

214  characters, 34 words, 3 lines

Shortened by using a list and linking two sentences together:

Program participants are 36% Latinx, 27% white, 25% black, and 12% Asian; 57% are single parents.

97 characters, 16 words, 2 lines

 

5. Edit to Fully Use Every Line

This can be done just by reordering words, as in the example below, or by cutting words or replacing them with words of different lengths. One way to help with this is to set your word processor to use automatic hyphenation.

Original sentence:

Every year, we run a food drive that engages community-based organizations, faith congregations, corporate sponsors, public schools, and youth groups in collecting food for neighbors in need.

3 lines

Shortened by filling each line:

Every year, we run a food drive that engages public schools, youth groups, corporate sponsors, faith congregations, and community-based organizations in collecting food for neighbors in need.

2 lines

 

6. Format to use the space better. Where appropriate, you can:

• Replace blocks of text with bullet lists that don’t use a full a full sentence for each item.
• Use a 6 point space between paragraphs instead of a 12 point space.
• Make your margins narrower.
• Use different fonts and font sizes.
• Use running heads instead of letting headings take up a whole line.
• Use spaces after bullets/numbers in lists instead of tabs.
• Use automatic hyphenation.

If writing something that people can opt to read or not, never make it too crowded, or they won’t read it. If it is their job to read it, you can get away with less white space, unless they have guidelines for elements like font and margin sizes, but remember that they still appreciate some white space.

 

Warning Online forms often produce longer character counts than Word does for the same text. Always paste text into the form to see if it shows how it counts characters. If it doesn’t show, plan to submit early, so you have time for last-minute editing if the form doesn’t tell you the response is over length until you hit “submit.” And if an online form doesn’t mention length limits, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have them. Always ask. Websites and designed print materials often change where lines end and how long writing appears. Always view a draft of your copy in its end format, so you can see if it needs to be cut further.