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Get Your Articles Published: Summaries

by Lesley Bown and Ann Gawthorpe

If you have written your article, and found that it is too long use summarizing techniques to reduce the length without losing any of the meaning.

First look for any unnecessary words or phrases, such as ‘however it can be said that’ or ‘the fact of the matter is’ – you can nearly always manage without them.

Next look for any repetitions – you may have used them as part of the style of the article, but cutting them will reduce your word count.

Then examine the adjectives, adverbs and qualifying phrases. It can be a useful discipline to remove them all from the article (remember to save the original somewhere first though). Read it through, and only replace the qualifiers that are absolutely necessary.

Re-read your descriptive passages – they can often be cut down – and check that you haven’t written too much about yourself.

Finally, identify the key sentence for each paragraph and see if you can rewrite the paragraph in fewer words while still keeping the sense.

Of course if you have already written very economically then summarising won’t work, and you will need to cut down the actual material in the article – it need not be wasted as you may be able to use it in another piece.

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