Which sentence should be revised to reduce wordiness?
The sentence to revise is the one whose meaning survives intact when you delete words from it. “Due to the fact that it was raining, we made the decision to cancel” reduces to “Because it was raining, we cancelled” — same meaning, half the words. If a cut changes nothing, the words were not doing anything.
The test: does the meaning survive the cut?
Wordiness is not about sentence length. A long sentence packed with information is not wordy; a seven-word sentence that could say the same thing in four is. The only reliable test is subtractive — remove words and see whether anything is lost. What survives unchanged was padding.
This matters because the usual advice, “write shorter sentences”, fixes the wrong problem. It shortens sentences that were carrying their weight and leaves the genuinely padded ones untouched. Ask what each phrase contributes instead.
Incorrect:
Due to the fact that the deadline was approaching, we made the decision to postpone.Correct: Because the deadline was approaching, we postponed.
Fourteen words to seven, with nothing lost.
The six patterns that create wordiness
Almost all wordiness comes from a short list of habits. Inflated connectives — “due to the fact that” for “because”, “in the event that” for “if”, “at this point in time” for “now”. Nominalizations, where a perfectly good verb is turned into a noun and then needs a weak verb propped in front of it: “made the decision to” instead of “decided”, “conducted an investigation into” instead of “investigated”.
Then: redundant pairs, where two words mean the same thing (“each and every”, “first and foremost”, “basic fundamentals”). Filler openers, which delay the subject (“There are several factors that influence…” becomes “Several factors influence…”). Unnecessary passive voice, which adds words and hides the actor. And qualifier stacking — “it seems fairly clear that it may possibly be the case that” — where hedges pile up until the sentence commits to nothing.
Incorrect:
There are a number of studies which have shown that sleep affects memory.Correct: Several studies show that sleep affects memory.
A filler opener plus a nominalization. The subject was buried five words in.
Incorrect:
An analysis of the data was conducted by the research team.Correct: The research team analysed the data.
Passive voice plus a nominalization. Naming the actor first shortens it by three words.
Incorrect:
In my personal opinion, I think the results are basically quite promising.Correct: The results are promising.
“In my opinion” and “I think” do the same job; “personal”, “basically” and “quite” do none.
What not to cut
Concision is not the same as brevity, and the difference matters. Hedges that carry real meaning must stay: in academic writing, “the data suggest” is a different and more honest claim than “the data prove”, and cutting the hedge misrepresents the finding. Transitions that show the reader how two paragraphs relate are earning their words. So is the repetition in a deliberately parallel sentence.
The question to ask is not “can this be shorter” but “does this word change what the sentence claims”. If deleting it changes the claim, it stays, however long the sentence gets.
