Length Discipline (anmath-length-management)

When to trigger

• The paper has grown long and you cannot defend every section's necessity
• Background or preliminaries dwarf the actual new mathematics
• The same idea is explained several times in different words
• You feel pressure to "say it is easy to see" to shorten a hard step — stop

The principle: long is fine, bloated is not

Annals papers can be long — a deep result may require many pages. Length is not a defect. Bloat is: material that does not advance the proof, padding, repetition, or restating known background at textbook length. The test for every paragraph is necessity, not size.