There are situations where you include unnecessary ideas and phrases in your content. But you can always avoid it or delete it once it happened.
Is your draft too long to fit into your word count limits? We’ve talked before about the things that you can consider as trim possibilities. However, once you have removed all the unnecessary adverbs and repetitive sentences, you may want to turn your attention to the “empty” sentences.
As its name implies, an empty sentence is one that does not convey anything of value. That means you don’t advance a paragraph, idea, or argument any further than where it was before the sentence.
- Facts. Facts are nice, but they usually work better combined with another sentence that adds something to them, like an analysis or an interpretation. In fact, sometimes it’s better to recite the facts in a list or paste them on a diagram, rather than dedicate whole sentences to them.
- Obvious. Obvious truths don’t need to have their own space. It’s obvious, so a passing mention in another sentence should be more than enough.
- Zero probability of denial. This refers to a sentence where the probability that you write its negation is zero. That makes it just as useless to advance the piece as a truism, since it brings no relevance with it.
The work of finding and removing stop sentences, combined with language proofing software and other activities to reduce text size, should be enough to allow you to reach your word count goals. Well, at least, in most cases.