Deciding what to leave out is one of the most consequential choices a writer makes — and one of the hardest. What to include is a question the first draft answers loosely. What to remove is a question only the writer can answer precisely, because the material being cut is material the writer has already written, already thought about, already invested in.
Cutting is where writing becomes what it is. A first draft contains everything the writer thought might be relevant. A finished piece contains what actually is. The distance between those two states is measured in the material that was removed, and the quality of the finished piece depends largely on how well those removal decisions were made.
The Test I Use First When Deciding What to Leave Out
Before cutting anything, I try to apply a single question to each element of the piece: does this serve the piece’s purpose for this reader?
The question has two parts, and both matter. Does it serve the purpose — does it contribute to what the piece is trying to do, or is it present because it was interesting to research, or because it felt relevant at the drafting stage, or because removing it would mean admitting that a section of the draft did not work? And does it serve this reader — is it pitched at the right level of knowledge, does it say something the reader cannot infer from what surrounds it, does it justify the time it will take to read?
Material that fails either part of the test is a candidate for cutting. Material that fails both is almost certainly gone.
The hardest material to cut is material that passes the purpose test but fails the reader test — the section that is genuinely relevant to the argument but goes into more depth than the reader needs. This requires a judgment about how much is enough, which varies by piece and by reader and cannot be reduced to a rule. The signal I look for is whether I am writing for myself or for the reader — whether the detail is there because it matters to the argument or because I find it interesting. The second reason is not sufficient.
What Cutting Actually Removes
The standard advice is to cut the parts readers tend to skip — a formulation that is right but incomplete, because it assumes the writer can identify those parts without difficulty. In practice, the parts readers tend to skip are not always obvious to the writer, because the writer has context that the reader lacks.
What cutting actually removes, in most well-written drafts, is one of three things.
The first is the warm-up: the material at the beginning of the piece where the writer was finding their way in. This almost always runs longer than necessary. The actual beginning of the piece — the moment where the thinking arrives — is usually buried a paragraph or two in. Everything before it is the writer’s warm-up, and the reader does not need to watch it.
The second is the over-explanation: the section that explains what has already been established, or that draws a conclusion the reader is fully capable of drawing for themselves. This is the instinct to close every gap, to make sure nothing has been missed. In practice, it produces prose that does not trust the reader — and readers, even when they cannot name what is happening, respond to distrust by losing interest.
The third is the tangent: the material that was interesting at the drafting stage but does not belong to the piece that was written. Every draft contains tangents — thoughts that were genuinely relevant to the thinking but are not relevant to the argument. They were worth following in the first draft. They are not worth keeping in the final one.
The Rule That Guides the Final Pass
When deciding what to leave out at the final pass — after everything obviously removable has gone, there is usually still material that could go but does not obviously need to. This is the hardest stage of cutting — not because the decisions are difficult but because the energy for them has usually been spent.
The rule I use for the final pass is: if a sentence could be removed without the piece losing anything — if its absence would not be noticed — it should go. This is a stricter version of the purpose test. It is not asking whether the sentence is relevant but whether it is necessary. Relevant sentences that are not necessary produce writing that is slightly longer than it needs to be, slightly less precise than it could be, and slightly harder to read than the reader deserves.
The resistance to this rule is real. Every sentence that survives to the final draft has been kept for a reason, and removing it feels like a small defeat. But the sentence that could be removed without loss is doing no work. And a piece with no sentences doing no work is a piece that respects the reader’s time — which is, in the end, a form of respect for the reader.
Deciding what to leave out is not a separate activity from writing. It is the final stage of thinking — the point at which the writer decides what the piece actually is, as opposed to what it might have been. The cut material is not wasted. It was part of the process that produced the piece. It simply does not belong in the piece itself.
What remains should be what could not be removed.