Writing in English is always harder than reading or listening for me. Sometimes, I need to use a very long complex stenense to express the meaning. Once I have wrote it, then I strugged to shave words off.
Fortunatelly, I read a twitter sharing tricks about it. So, I just copy it down here.
- Make things plural to omit articles. They can add up.
- Ex: “The teacher needs to know …” –> “Teachers need to know …”
- Turn some prepositional phrases into adjectives.
- Ex: “Schools in urban communities” –> “Urban schools”
- Some multi-word pharses can easily be truned into one word.
- Ex: “Due to the fact that” –> “because”
- Ex: “In order to” –> “to”
- If you are describing something with two adjectives, pick one, maybe a new one.
- Ex: “Classrooms are blooming and buzzing” –> “Classroom are hectic”
- Get rid of passive voice.
- Ex: “This study is focused on…” –> “This study focuses on”
- Plain(er) language is your friend.
- Ex: “Consistent with the theoretical perspective that learning is fundamentally situative…” –> “Aligned with your view on the situative learning”
- If a multi-word term is going to be repeated a lot, use an acronym. (And this is from somebody woho laothes acronyms! But they help with word count.)
- A common writing quirk: Writing a thick, dense sentence followed by “In other words,” with a lucid explanation. Get rid of the frist sentence and shtart with the second.
- Omit unnecessary intensifiers like “very” or “extremely”.