Cut your own writing by a third without losing the point
Most first drafts are the right ideas buried in too many words.
- Use it for
- Anyone whose first draft is always longer than it needs to be.
Most editing advice is "make it tighter," which is true and useless — it doesn't say what to actually cut. The real skill is telling the difference between a sentence carrying the argument forward and a sentence that exists because it felt necessary while drafting: throat-clearing, restating what you just said, hedging that adds nothing. Cutting well means identifying which is which, not trimming everything by the same amount.
This prompt asks for the reasoning behind each cut, not just a shorter version, so you can actually learn the pattern instead of re-running this every time.
When not to use this
For something already tight and functional — a two-line status update, a short reply — this is more process than the text needs. This is for anything long enough that you suspect (correctly) it could say the same thing in less space.
Did this work?
The edited version is meaningfully shorter and every sentence you can point to a specific reason it was cut, not just "it flows better now."
Tested on claude-opus-5. Evidence status is draft; it moves to battle-tested only on recorded runs, never by hand.