Here is a soup recipe with five ingredients. Make it better.
What did you just do in your head?
Almost everyone reaches for a sixth ingredient. A pinch of this. A garnish of that. Almost nobody thinks: take one out.
That reflex is the reason your writing is too long.
Concise Writing Is a Delete Problem, Not a Word Count
We tell each other to "be concise" like it is a matter of willpower. Trim the fat. Tighten it up. As if the words are just sitting there, and you lack the discipline to cut them.
But the problem runs deeper than discipline. It is baked into how your brain solves problems.
In 2021, researchers led by Leidy Klotz published a study in Nature with a title that should be taped to every writer's monitor: "People systematically overlook subtractive changes." They handed people a wobbly Lego structure and asked them to make it stable. The cheap fix was to remove a single block. Most people added blocks instead. Grids to make symmetrical, essays to improve, itineraries to fix. Over and over, when the better answer was to take something away, people piled something on.
We do not forget that subtraction is an option. We never consider it in the first place.
Now put that in front of a blank page.
You write a sentence. It feels thin, so you add a qualifier. The point feels unclear, so you add an example. The intro feels abrupt, so you add a warm-up line that says nothing. Every instinct points the same direction: more. And the draft swells with words that are each defensible and collectively fatal.
Writing for Busy Readers Means Cutting for Them
Here is who pays for all that adding: the reader.
Todd Rogers and Jessica Lasky-Fink wrote a whole book on this called Writing for Busy Readers. Their core finding is almost rude in its simplicity. People do not read your writing. They skim it, mid-task, half-distracted, deciding in a second whether it is worth the effort. Every extra word raises the toll on their attention.
So the reader is not asking for beautiful prose. They are asking one question: can I get what I need and get out.
Concise writing is how you answer yes.
And it is not about writing short. A three-thousand-word essay can be lean. A four-line email can be bloated. Concise means every word left standing is load-bearing.
How to Write Concisely: Edit by Subtraction
The fix is a habit, not a talent. You override the add reflex on purpose, in the second pass. Here is the method we use.
Write the ugly draft first, then carve. Do not edit while you write. Get the whole messy thing down, then come back as a cutter, not a builder.
Delete every sentence that only sets up the next one. Throat-clearing hides in transitions. "In today's fast-moving world." "Now, let me explain." Cut them and the piece starts on the actual point.
Cut the qualifiers. "I think this might possibly be a somewhat useful approach in certain cases" is a full-strength claim wearing four layers of armor. Take the armor off.
One idea per line. When a sentence is carrying two ideas, it is usually hiding a delete.
Read it aloud and drop what you stumble on. Your mouth finds the dead weight your eye slides past.
Shorter is braver. Adding is easy because it feels productive. Cutting is hard because it feels like loss. But the delete you are avoiding is almost always the one that would make the whole thing land.
We built Writeous on exactly this instinct: write one clean markdown file, and get a blog post, a newsletter, an X thread, and a LinkedIn post, each formatted right, in about a minute. Write the lean version once. Publish it everywhere.
The Subtraction Test
Next time a piece feels off, resist the instinct to add.
Do not reach for another example, another caveat, another warm-up line. Ask the harder question first: what can come out.
Nine times out of ten, the fix was never a missing ingredient.
It was the one you were afraid to remove.
This post first appeared on the Writeous blog.
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