There are situations where you include unnecessary ideas and phrases in your content. But you can always avoid it or remove it once it happened.

Is your draft too long to fit within your word count limits? We’ve talked before about things you can consider as clipping possibilities. However, once you’ve eliminated 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 beyond where it was before the sentence.

  1. Facts. Facts are nice, but they usually work best when paired with another sentence that adds something to them, like an analysis or interpretation. In fact, sometimes it’s better to recite facts in a list or paste them into a diagram, rather than dedicate full sentences to them.
  2. Obvious. Obvious truths do not need to have their own space. It’s obvious, so a passing mention in another sentence should be more than enough.
  3. Zero probability of denial. This refers to a sentence where the probability that you will 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 empty sentences, combined with language correction 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.