Good morning QualityGal writers! We hope you all had a great Labor Day weekend. Now that we’re back at the office, we wanted to share with you some helpful strategies to “tighten” up your writing, turning flabby sentences and paragraphs into lean, mean content machines! Although you can find these principles in many texts, the main source of these principles is The Basics of Clarity and Grace by Joseph Williams, an amazing little book every writer should have on his or her bookshelf.

The fundamental concept today is: concision is precision. By that, we mean that the fewer words a writer uses, the clearer his or her writing is. Now, we’re not advocating leaving necessary ideas or content out, and we understand that assignments come with word counts. But if a writer writes something in twenty words and can say the same thing in ten, without losing any of his/her meaning, the writer should cut, cut, cut! After all, the best writing is REWRITING.

Here are four basic principles to help writers pare down their writing without sacrificing quality.

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