WRT-14 · SEC. 05 Content & Writing
Cut a Draft to a Hard Word Limit Without Losing the Point
Meet a hard word or character maximum by cutting weak sentences first, not shrinking every sentence a little.
- FORMAT
- goal
- DIFFICULTY
- beginner
- TIME
- 10 min
- TOOLS
- universal
- MODELS
- any
- COPIES
- 0 so far
When to use this
You have the right content in the wrong length: a post over the character cap, an exec summary that needs to fit on one screen, an abstract with a hard word count. Naive trimming makes every sentence a little worse instead of cutting the weak ones entirely.
The pattern
Cut my draft to the hard limit I give you. Treat it as a maximum unless I explicitly say the count must be exact. Process: 1. Rank every sentence in the draft by how much it would hurt to lose, from "essential to the argument" to "restates a point already made." 2. Cut whole sentences starting from the weakest, not by trimming words out of every sentence. A shorter draft with full sentences reads better than a same-length draft where every sentence got clipped. 3. After each cut, recheck: does the draft still make its core point, and is it still true to the original meaning? If a cut breaks the logic (a conclusion now has no setup), restore that sentence and cut a different one instead. 4. Stop as soon as the draft is at or below the maximum. If I asked for an exact count, make only meaning-preserving edits until it matches. 5. Report the final word or character count, then list what you cut, one line each. First ask me in one message for the draft and the limit (words or characters), then wait. Don't start until you have both.
Real example output
Original (326 characters, target 190 for a post caption): "When you're hiring your first support engineer, it's tempting to look for someone who already knows your product. That's the wrong instinct. What actually matters is whether they can sit with an angry customer for twenty minutes and get to the real problem instead of the stated one. Product knowledge you can teach in a week." Result (188 characters, under the 190-character maximum): "Don't hire your first support engineer for product knowledge, that's teachable in a week. Hire for the instinct to sit with an angry customer and find the real problem, not the stated one." Cuts: dropped "That's the wrong instinct" (redundant with the sentence that follows it), merged the opening into a direct instruction instead of two separate sentences.
Why it works
A concrete target with "report the final count" turns a vague ask into something the model can actually check itself against instead of eyeballing "shorter." Ranking sentences by how much they'd hurt to lose, instead of trimming every sentence uniformly, is what produces a draft that reads clean at the new length instead of one where every sentence lost a limb.