The Chopping Block
Six Ways to Determine What to Keep and What to Cut in Your Writing
Learn how to sharpen your writing by fine tuning what makes it to the final cut and what gets left behind for another day.
Writing is an act of creation. But just because we create something doesn’t mean it belongs in our work. In fact, there’s a lot that should be left out. Determining what makes it into that final cut might be one of the most challenging tasks in nonfiction writing. So how do you decide what stays and what goes?
We’ll answer that question by giving you six questions to ask yourself when revising your own writing.
Revising isn’t a new concept, nor is it exclusive to writing. You have the theatrical release versus the director’s cut in the movie industry, artists’ renditions of public projects. Reworking happens every day with books, visual art, speeches, and even the menu at your favorite restaurant. You can’t always fit everything you want to into a single work.
Reasons for revising include improving clarity and flow, tailoring content to readers’ interests, and cutting content to meet word count requirements. Most important, however, is that in most cases, your writing is stronger when you leave things out. Or to look at it another way, your writing is better when it’s focused.
Help Your Audience by Leaving Material Out
Every writer wants to reach as wide an audience as possible. That’s understandable. And while it might seem like more material and more subject matter would appeal to more people, that’s not necessarily true.
Let’s say you’re writing about programming in JavaScript for beginners. A person just learning to code isn’t going to understand your in-depth description of promises in asynchronous JavaScript or how genetic algorithms work.
Similarly, if you want to reach an audience of expert programmers, you can’t spend time on the basics of programming. And if you try to reach both of these groups, you’ll likely come off as too advanced for one audience and too basic for the other.
Focusing your work and leaving material out helps you reach your target audience, and helps them understand your work. It’s good customer service, as a writer, to trim the excess, leave material out, and write directly for your target readers.
The hard part is figuring out what you should leave behind for another blog post or book.
Let’s take a look at the book Tracking Personal Finances Using Python, by Siddhant Goel. There are numerous ways he could have approached this book. This flowchart is just one example of looking at what to leave out and what to put in.
Clearly, there are multiple directions Goel could have taken with his book. Of course, we know that he ultimately decided on helping people make their own program with Python. He could have made this a tutorial on personal finance using a calculator and notebook, adapting existing financial software to suit your preferences, or even building your own tracking software in multiple programming languages.
However, by leaving out those other possibilities and focusing the lens on teaching readers to design their own personal finance system with Python, Goel is defining and writing for his target audience. That audience happens to be people with some programming experience in Python who want to avoid using commercial software for tracking their finances.
In his own words, “I’ll start with defining a few basic concepts which are crucial to understanding the rest of the text. After that bit of background is out of the way, I’ll get to the ‘workflow’ side of things and the different tools that support this workflow.”
Successful authors in fields from programming to music, architecture to cooking — and everything in-between — constantly revise. Careful authors check in with the reader on their shoulder to ask if what they have written is what their audience needs.
Take Your Text to the Editing Room
When you realize that you need to focus your content by cutting some material, how do you do that? What should you leave behind? Here are six questions to ask yourself about what to keep and what to cut in your writing.
1. What is your writing about? Sum up the message you want to convey in a sentence or two. For longer works, you might need a paragraph. In either case, everything you write should point back to that message. If you really want to challenge yourself and level up, skip the sentences and paragraphs and trim your takeaway statement down to a few words that define your piece.
2. Does your writing follow a cohesive narrative? You may or may not need to do this with a short blog post, but with longer material it helps to have an outline or table of contents. For example, Craig Walls’ book, Build Talking Apps for Alexa: Creating Voice-First, Hands-Free User Experiences, is, as you can guess, about building Alexa-compatible apps. As you look through the contents, you can see the book follows a path from how Alexa works, to integrating user data, to adding sound effects, and eventually to selling your talking apps as products.
3. Does the content fit? Read through your outline, blog post, or manuscript and see if anything stands out as tangential. Hunting down divergent topics is the easiest way to find material that you can safely remove. Looking again at the table of contents in Walls’ book, you won’t find a history of Alexa or a philosophical examination of AI technology in daily life. Would that be interesting content? Undoubtedly! Does it fit with learning to build your own Alexa apps? Not so much.
4. Did you repeat yourself? Repetition happens, especially in longer pieces, and can be useful if you are trying to teach a difficult concept. Aside from that deliberate purpose, repeating yourself can be frustrating for readers. Planning documents like an outline can help reduce repetition, but the best thing to do is revise, revise, revise.
5. Do all your topics help the reader progress towards the primary goal? Where do you want your reader to end up? Looking back to Walls’ book, it’s clear he wants the reader to be able to build their own talking app. To that end, the author takes the reader step-by-step through building talking apps in a streamlined way.
6. Can you use the cut content elsewhere? Anything and everything in your writing is subject to revision or cutting. Maybe you have an insight about quantum computing while writing a book on algorithms — but if it doesn’t fit, it gets cut. Don’t just delete your brilliant idea, though. Add it to a folder of material for later use. Just because it doesn’t fit here, doesn’t mean the content won’t be useful later. That realization can help you let go and be more ruthless about chopping content that doesn’t belong.
📢 Do you have and tips for revising or questions that you ask yourself when determining what to cut from your writing? Please share them in the comments.
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