Last night I took a 1,200 word piece down to 610 in 25 minutes by reading it out loud and deleting anything I couldn’t explain in one breath. Got other dead-simple edit rules that save time?
I do a brutal Ctrl+F pass for “that,” “just,” and adverbs — delete or rewrite — then run https://hemingwayapp.com for a quick clarity check; it’s a fast 10-minute sweep after your “one breath” cut. , the only caveat is sometimes a needed qualifier fails the breath test, so I split it into two short sentences instead of nuking it. Do you stick to a single 25-minute pass or do one more for structure?