Tighten

Make a long document shorter without losing what it says. The guarantee is the point: if a fact goes missing, this failed, however good the prose got.

The trap to avoid first

Word-level trimming feels like progress and is almost never the answer. Cutting repeated adjectives out of a 500-line document saves 20 lines. The reason a document is long is usually structural, and structural fixes save 5-10x more while making it clearer.

Diagnose before you cut. If you find yourself grepping for filler words in step one, stop.

Step 1: Diagnose the kind of long

Read the whole document first. Then name which of these it is. Most long documents are two.