conciseness-editing-guide

npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Auto-Empirical-Research-Skills --skill conciseness-editing-guide --agent claude-code

Same command for any agent — swap --agent for codex, cursor, copilot.

# Conciseness Editing Guide A skill for systematically eliminating wordiness, redundancy, and unnecessary complexity in academic writing. Covers common verbosity patterns, sentence-level compression techniques, paragraph restructuring strategies, and methods for reducing word count while preserving meaning and nuance. ## Why Conciseness Matters in Academia Academic papers face strict word or page limits. Reviewers read hundreds of papers and reward clarity. Verbose writing obscures arguments, frustrates readers, and often signals muddled thinking. A concise paper communicates more ideas per page, leaving room for additional analysis, examples, or discussion. Journals frequently reject manuscripts that exceed length limits, and reviewers regularly cite "needs tightening" as a criticism. ## Common Wordiness Patterns ### Expletive Constructions Expletive constructions begin sentences with "It is" or "There are" followed by a delayed subject. They add words without adding meaning. ``` Pattern: "It is/was... that/who..." Before: "It is well established that climate change affects biodiversity in tropical regions." After: "Climate change affects biodiversity in tropical regions (Smith, 2