You probably won’t lose credit for duller writing, but you will for exceeding the word count. Whilst adjectives make your writing livelier and more interesting to read, you can nearly always sacrifice them to reduce word count in academic writing. Tip: using ctrl + f to search through your document for “ly” is a quick way to find a lot of adverbs. For example, “dropped rapidly” could be replaced with “plummeted”. At the very least, adverb-verb pairs can be converted into a better chosen verb on its own.

Delete adverbsĪdverbs are usually very deletable in academic writing. In that case, you’re actually making the experience more pleasant for them by cutting out the extras in your writing. They may not even notice your prose style particularly, instead looking for the important content to follow the thread of your argument. This isn’t a literature contest - it’s about getting your ideas down on paper in the least amount of words possible.Īlso remember that the person reviewing your work and giving you credit is most likely going to scan through it at high speed. This may make your writing less pleasant to read, but realistically you can’t be marked down for that.

The goal here is to reduce your writing down to its bear bones, leaving little else behind. Reduce word count by simplifying your style Quite often those can take at least a thousand words off on their own. It’s not about making it faster to read, necessarily.Īlso, make the following quick checks that might let you cut out a lot of word Word count actually means reducing the number of spaces (i.e. There are one or two things you can do to reduce word count without affecting (By the way, you’re reading a site about East Asian Studies – if you’re Substance of your writing, but you’ve got no choice if you want to hand the This can be a painful task, because you don’t want to lose the More often than not, you end up needing to reduce word count in your academic Some tricks to reduce word count in academic writing

Words cut off in word