Concise Writing: Cutting Zombie Nouns, Filler Words, and Wordy Phrases
Trimming a sentence isn't about hitting a word count — it's about catching the noun that's secretly a verb, the phrase that repeats itself, and the words doing no work at all.
Short Isn't the Goal, Density Is
Take this sentence: "The manager made the decision to implement a reduction in the workforce." Eleven words. Now: "The manager cut jobs." Four words, same fact, and the second version is harder to look away from. That gap is what conciseness actually measures — not character count, but how much of the sentence is doing real work.
A lot of editing advice treats brevity as the goal, so writers start hacking at word count and end up with clipped, choppy prose that still says nothing. That's backwards. The question isn't "how do I make this shorter," it's "which of these words is carrying weight, and which one is just standing there." Once you can tell the difference, the sentence gets shorter on its own.
Zombie Nouns: When a Verb Gets Turned Into Furniture
A nominalization is a verb wearing a noun costume. "Decide" becomes "make a decision." "Discover" becomes "make a discovery." "Fail" becomes "experience a failure." The action is still in there, but it's been frozen into an object, which means you now need a second, weaker verb — make, conduct, perform, undergo — just to keep the sentence moving.
Compare: "The committee conducted an evaluation of the proposal before arriving at a determination" versus "The committee evaluated the proposal and decided." The first version buries two verbs (evaluate, decide) inside two nouns (evaluation, determination) and pads the gap with conducted, of, before, and arriving at. Nominalizations are especially common after words like "the fact that," "there was," and "it is," which tend to smuggle a whole clause's worth of dead weight in ahead of the actual subject.
You don't have to ban nominalizations outright — "decision" is the right word when you're talking about the abstract concept of deciding, not the act itself. The test is simpler: read the sentence and ask who is doing what. If the answer is buried three nouns deep, put the verb back where it belongs.
Trading Wordy Phrases for Plain Ones
| Wordy phrase | Plain version |
|---|---|
| due to the fact that | because |
| at this point in time | now |
| in the event that | if |
| has the ability to | can |
| with regard to / in regard to | about |
| a large number of | many |
| in order to | to |
| for the purpose of | for |
| in the process of doing | doing |
| prior to | before |
Tautologies Hiding in Plain Sight
- advance planning — planning happens in advance by definition
- past history — history is already past
- each and every — pick one
- final outcome — outcomes are what's final
- unexpected surprise — surprises are, by nature, unexpected
- close proximity — proximity already means close
- completely finished — finished doesn't come in degrees
- free gift — a gift you paid for isn't a gift
- future plans — plans are always about the future
- brief summary — summaries are supposed to be brief
Filler Words That Do No Work
Filler words are different from tautologies — they're not redundant with a specific word nearby, they just don't add meaning anywhere. "Really," "very," "just," "actually," "basically," "kind of," "in a sense," and "the fact that" are the usual suspects. Read this sentence out loud: "Basically, the report is just kind of a summary of what actually happened." Strip the filler: "The report summarizes what happened." Nothing was lost.
Filler often shows up as a hedge — a way of softening a claim the writer isn't fully confident in. That's worth noticing separately from the editing pass, because sometimes the fix isn't deleting the hedge word, it's deciding what you actually think and stating that instead.
A Four-Pass Edit for Cutting Weight
- 1Pass 1: Hunt nominalizations
Search for word endings like -tion, -ment, -ance, -ing used as a noun, and for helper verbs like "make," "conduct," "perform," and "undergo" sitting next to them. Turn the noun back into a verb wherever the sentence allows it.
- 2Pass 2: Swap wordy phrases
Run a find for the usual offenders — "due to the fact that," "in order to," "at this point in time" — and replace each with its plain equivalent. This pass alone often cuts 10 to 15 percent of a draft's length.
- 3Pass 3: Check for tautologies
Look at every adjective-noun and noun-noun pair and ask whether one word already implies the other. If it does, cut one.
- 4Pass 4: Read it aloud
Filler words are easiest to hear, not see. Anywhere your voice stumbles over an extra word that adds no information, cut it and read the sentence again.
Before deleting a word, delete it mentally and reread the sentence. If the meaning holds, the word wasn't load-bearing — cut it. If the sentence goes vague or the tone shifts, the word was doing something real. Keep it. This one check catches most of the false economy that makes over-edited writing sound clipped instead of clear.
Editing Is a Separate Pass From Writing
None of this works as a first-draft habit. Trying to write concisely and originally at the same time usually produces neither — you end up self-editing mid-sentence and losing the thread of what you were trying to say. Write the clumsy version first. Then go back with the four passes above and cut what isn't earning its place.
If you'd rather not run every pass by hand on a long draft, AI Humanizer Lab's Paraphraser can take a first crack at tightening wordy phrases and flattened nominalizations, leaving you to do the finer judgment calls — like which hedge word is a filler and which one is an honest qualifier.
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