Getting your waffle down!
I get a lot of emails from students who struggle to get what they've written down to meet a word count.
I just wanted to give a little advice on changing sentence structures to achieve the same meaning with fewer words (i.e. conciseness) - this is a hard skill, and takes a long time to master. I have a 'conciseness mode' I go into for processing my pieces of writing in this way where I am literally just looking at sentence structure and not really processing the meaning of what I'm reading - it's very very different to reading something to process the quality of the arguments being made. I can sometimes read a whole paragraph in this 'conciseness' mode and not really know the meaning of what I've read as I'm so focused on grammar! (I'm letting you know this so that, if you've never experienced this 'mode' before, you should try it - it's a total trip!)
Let's take this paragraph from an essay as an example:
Attention can be defined as “a state of focused awareness on a subset of the available perceptual information” (Gerrig, 2005). ‘Attention disorders’ in this study will refer to Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder [ADHD], which can be is recognised as the severe and “developmentally inappropriate” inattentive, hyperactive and impulsive behaviours in children (Swanson, Sergeant, Taylor, Sonuga-Barke, Jensen & Cantwell, 1998). The link between attention and academic performance is an area which has been widely researched, however, the impact of sleep is rarely explored. Academic performance is a progressive process which involves learning new skills and improving current skills (Duncan et al., 2007). Generally, research suggests that the abilities to remain consistently attended and control attention are able to predict academic achievement (such as school grades and test scores) (Alexander, Entwisle & Dauber, 1993).
This is pretty well written, and not excessively waffly, but it can still be reduced a lot. I've used strikethrough to indicate deleted content, and bold-underline-italic to indicate added content.
Attention can be defined as “a state of focused awareness on a subset of the available perceptual information” (Gerrig, 2005). ‘Attention disorders’ in this study will refer to Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder [ADHD], which can be is recognised as the severe and “developmentally inappropriate” inattentive, hyperactive and impulsive behaviours in children (Swanson, Sergeant, Taylor, Sonuga-Barke, Jensen & Cantwell, 1998). The link between attention and academic performance is an area which has been widely researched, however, the impact of sleep is rarely explored. Academic performance is a progressive process which involves learning and improving new skills and improving current skills (Duncan et al., 2007). Generally, research suggests that the abilities to remain consistently attended and controlled attention are is able to predict academic achievement (such as school grades and test scores) (Alexander, Entwisle & Dauber, 1993).
So we saved ~30 words in this paragraph, which wasn't really very 'waffly' to begin with, while barely changing the meaning. The main 'tricks' are:
Deleting unneccessary clusters of words e.g. 'an area which has been', which don't add anything to a sentence grammatically.
Replacing clusters of words with an alternative single word that can do the same job e.g. 'which can be' -> 'is' (this changes the meaning slightly by adding more certainty, but I think that's ok in this context as it's a confident claim - sometimes it wouldn't be).
Finding alternative ways to phrase things e.g. 'Involves learning new skills and improving current skills' becomes 'learning and improving skills' <- the repetition of 'skills' is a clue that there's redundancy here.
Deleting things which add a bit, but not enough / probably won't improve marks e.g. 'is a progressive process which' and 'the abilities to remain consistently attended' <- even if there is a subtle distinction between attention and controlled attention, is that distinction necessary for this report given it's focus, or will the umbrella term attention do? (Ok this one requires you to think about the meaning rather than just the grammar I suppose).
Getting words down can take a lot of time - you should expect to spend 1-2 hours doing just this on a typical essay or lab report. However it's really important to note that this is not just to fit into an arbitrary word count - conciseness is extremely important in science writing as we are trying to make our arguments as transparent as possible to our reader i.e. not hidden behind waffle.
Good cutting!
Stephen