Tightening long copy

What tightening is

Tightening is a cutting pass. I take a document that is too long, remove roughly a third of the words, and hand back a version that says the same things to the same reader. No section disappears, no claim is dropped, no fact goes missing. What goes is the material carrying nothing: the run-up before the point, the qualification made four times, the conclusion restated because the writer was not sure it had landed.

It is a specialist pass, not a level on the editing ladder, and you can buy it on its own. It is not structural editing, which decides what sections exist and what order they come in; tightening leaves the shape alone. It is not line editing, which reworks how sentences sound; a tightened sentence sounds like yours, only shorter. It is not copyediting, so it is not a correction pass, and it is certainly not a proofread. If a shortened document has to be error-free as well, that is a second pass and I will quote it.

And it is not summarising. A summary is a new, shorter document standing in for a long one. Tightening returns the same document, still complete, in fewer pages. If what you need is two pages instead of forty, that is an executive summary, and it is a different piece of work.

When you need one

When a length has been set for you. A tender with a page limit. A trade magazine with a word count. A proposal template that has to fit a binder. An annual report the board will not read past page ten. In each case the content is agreed and the problem is arithmetic.

The other case is the document nobody finishes. Readers call it thorough, which is the word people use for too long, and the parts that would persuade them sit behind material they gave up on. Long web pages, guides written by several hands, and any document that has grown by accretion over three years are the usual candidates.

You do not need this if the document is the right length and simply hard going, which is a sentence problem and belongs to line editing, or an effort problem best handled as readability work. You do not need it if readers cannot find the point, because moving the point is cheaper than cutting around it, and that is a structural edit. Cutting a badly ordered document just produces a shorter badly ordered document.

What gets cut, and in what order

• The throat-clearing opening. Almost every section begins with a paragraph explaining that it is about to begin. This goes first, everywhere, and typically accounts for a tenth of the document on its own.
• Repeated qualification. The hedge applied once is honest. Applied in every paragraph it is noise, and it makes a confident document sound nervous. One statement of the caveat, in the right place, does the work of nine.
• The restated conclusion. Writers who doubt the reader was paying attention say the same thing again at the end of each section and once more at the end of the document. The reader was paying attention.
• Examples past the first. Three illustrations of one point convince nobody who was not convinced by the first. The best one stays; the others go or become a line.
• Prose that should be a table. Four paragraphs comparing three options become a table a reader can take in at a glance, and about 300 words leave the document.

Anything I am unsure about is not deleted. It moves to a holding section at the end of the file, so you can see exactly what came out and put any of it back.

What you get

The short version. Your document at roughly two-thirds the length, in the format you sent, with the structure and headings unchanged so it drops back into whatever it lives in.

The marked-up version. Tracked changes showing every deletion, so nobody has to take my word for what left. On a document with several owners this is the one that gets circulated, and it settles most arguments before they start.

The cuts file. Everything removed, in order, under the heading it came from. If a reviewer insists a passage was essential, it takes thirty seconds to restore it rather than an afternoon to rewrite it.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A Kelowna environmental consultancy has a 44-page services document used in public-sector bids. A new procurement portal caps submissions at 30 pages, and the partners have spent two weeks failing to agree on what to delete.

The tightening pass takes four working days. Section openings that announce the section come out first: eleven of them, about 1,400 words. The firm's approach to stakeholder consultation is described in three places, so the fullest one stays and the other two become cross-references. Six paragraphs comparing monitoring methods become one table. The phrase "in accordance with applicable provincial regulations" appears 23 times and is stated once, at the front, then dropped. The document lands at 28 pages with every scored item intact, and the cuts file runs to 16 pages that nobody, in the event, asks to put back.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. What the document is, what the target length is, and whether tightening or restructuring is the right answer. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. Quoted on the original word count, because that is what I read, not on what survives. Agreed before I start.
3. You send the document and the constraint. The page limit, the word count, or simply "shorter". Also tell me the passages that cannot be touched for legal or contractual reasons.
4. The cutting pass. One read to mark, one to cut, one cold read to check nothing needed went with it. Three to six working days for most documents.
5. Delivery. Short version, marked-up version and the cuts file, with a call if the target was missed or overshot.

What it costs

Tightening is quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call, calculated on the original word count rather than the finished one. That is worth saying plainly, because the alternative rewards padding. A document that needs a quarter taken out costs less per page than one that has to lose half. The number is fixed in writing before anything starts, and the pricing page sets out the four ways I work.

What happens next

The shortened document usually goes for a copyedit, because cutting creates seams where two paragraphs are now neighbours that never were. After that, a final read before it is laid out. If the exercise showed the document was three documents wearing one cover, a structural edit is the next conversation. This pass stands on its own, and nothing further is assumed.