Striving for brevity, maintaining comprehensiveness

Summarizing skills are needed for more than writing summaries. The ILO writer is constantly faced with the problem of compressing large amounts of information into relatively small documents: notes for the record, minutes of meetings, and country reports.

As well, when writing official reports that are published by the Organization, you have likely agreed beforehand on a recommended word count. If your report has run beyond that agreed word count, you need to employ strategies that will get your report down to the proper size. This often involves applying summarizing skills as well as removing parts of your work that do not serve your purposes.

Here are some tips for reducing your word count. These are really a variation of the skills needed to create summaries for your report, such as an abstract or executive summary.

• “Brevity is achieved by selection rather than compression.” This quote by the journalist and writing instructor Donald M. Murray is probably the best advice on this subject. If you need to cut back, you are going to have to decide what stays and what goes. Whittling away at your text sentence by sentence cannot reduce your word count effectively enough to make a difference in the length of an entire report.
• Set a definitive goal for your word count reduction. For example, you may decide to reduce a section or page by 30%. Knowing how much you need to reduce by will help you decide how and where to cut back.
• Determine your main idea of a section or paragraph and cut out the extraneous parts. You will find it more effective to reduce entire paragraphs and sentences rather than just words.
• At the sentence level, look for long-winded expressions, redundancies, repetition and noun-based phrases. Use your skills to turn these into more direct and succinct sentences.

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