Conciseness and sentence reduction

Concise medical text removes words while preserving meaning, quantities, conditions and qualifications. The parts divide by the kind of shortening: cutting wordiness within a sentence and reducing information to a smaller grammatical unit. Building sentences, choosing voice and replacing nominalisations, managing whole-document length, and meeting an abstract’s word limit belong to neighbouring concerns.

• Cutting wordiness without losing meaning — recognising redundant words, roundabout phrases and empty openings, checking what a cut changes, and applying a repeatable shortening pass
• Reducing a sentence, clause or phrase to a shorter unit — folding secondary sentences into their neighbours and reducing clauses, modifier strings, repeated words and absolute phrases