My manuscript is too long! How can I shorten it?

It’s a common issue for researchers: You’ve finished writing your article, but the word count has flown past the journal’s limit. How can you cut anything? After all, you’re an expert on your topic, and your readers want to spend several hours poring over the details that you’ve carefully crafted for them. Right? 

Alas, no. They don’t want to. 

Readers of academic journals want information delivered quickly. They want to be able to skim through many different journal articles to catch up on the latest developments in the field. As such, your article is more likely to be accepted for publication if you can concisely deliver a compelling storyline. So: it’s time to start cutting text.

Examine your draft’s introduction. Introductions remind me of when I was a kid making a yard sale sign: my letters started out enormous, but the final “ALE” had to be squeezed together. Academic writers similarly tend to over-describe at the beginning and then run out of room at the end. To trim your introduction, remove background information – that’s what the main article is for. Focus on the main scientific point of your article and its potential impact. In other words, include only the information that’s relevant to the overarching story of the research. Readers wanting more details will dive into the larger text.

Trust your audience. You’re not writing a textbook for undergraduates but communicating with your peers. In the introduction, you can provide a summary of recent research, cite several sources together, and only provide specific details about the most relevant and influential studies, trusting that readers will be able to look up the studies and find more details on their own. Similarly, assume that readers understand basic methods and focus on describing the most novel steps that you performed. 

Shorten phrases. Look for words that end in “-ion” combined with the word “of.” For example, “we created a virtual reproduction of the movement” could be shortened to “we virtually reproduced the movement.” Likewise, you could shorten “we undertook the testing of” to simply “we tested.”

Cut single words. You can make small adjustments to your word count by removing adverbs. Specifically, writers tend to overuse single words at the beginning of sentences, which you may have heard called conjunctions. (There was one such word in the previous sentence.) Relying too heavily on “however,” “therefore,” and “consequently,” and phrases such as “on the other hand” can weaken your writing. Your article should be organized in a way that shows the logical connections between ideas instead of needing to over-rely on introductory adverbs. 

If you want to tell your research story with more clarity, consider participating in IEM’s Manuscript Writing Workshop in the fall. During the 10-week, in-person workshop, you will learn what makes a high-quality manuscript, how to refine your figures and integrate them into their manuscript, and how to organize your manuscript through group discussions and 1-1 feedback from a professional writer.  

Apply for the Fall 2025 Manuscript Writing Workshop by August 31. Space is limited.