One exercise that I found extremely helpful when learning how to condense my writing was:
Try to include a verb and a direct object in each of your bullet points.
Try to make sure each of your bullet points makes a falsifiable claim.
This forces you to confirm that each of your major points has substantive, useful content. “The process behind deprecation” is an excellent ‘note to self’ to remind you of what your topic is, but a person can write that note without having the faintest idea what the process behind deprecation is. My Bayesian prior for notes like that after reading thousands of social science articles is that you’re most likely going to go on for pages and pages without drawing any firm conclusions. If, instead, you make a bold claim like “Deprecation is strictly dominated by other social strategies,” then I predict that you’re going to try to say something interesting. I may disagree with your methods or your evidence, but at least I can gauge whether your effort, if successful, would be of interest to me.
One exercise that I found extremely helpful when learning how to condense my writing was:
Try to include a verb and a direct object in each of your bullet points.
Try to make sure each of your bullet points makes a falsifiable claim.
This forces you to confirm that each of your major points has substantive, useful content. “The process behind deprecation” is an excellent ‘note to self’ to remind you of what your topic is, but a person can write that note without having the faintest idea what the process behind deprecation is. My Bayesian prior for notes like that after reading thousands of social science articles is that you’re most likely going to go on for pages and pages without drawing any firm conclusions. If, instead, you make a bold claim like “Deprecation is strictly dominated by other social strategies,” then I predict that you’re going to try to say something interesting. I may disagree with your methods or your evidence, but at least I can gauge whether your effort, if successful, would be of interest to me.