---
name: draft-tightener
description: Cut 20 percent of a draft while preserving the argument, using sentence-level surgery instead of paragraph deletion.
title: Draft Tightener
category: writing-editing
difficulty: beginner
author: admin
icon: ✂️
input: text
output: markdown
phase: enhance
domain: content
tags: copyediting,draft-compression,sentence-level-editing,word-count-reduction,hedging-removal,content-preservation,filler-phrase-elimination,document-revision,diff-output,constraint-based-editing,connective-tissue,rewriting
best_for:
  - academic papers and research drafts
  - business reports and proposals
  - long-form articles and essays
  - technical documentation needing concision
---

## Description

Input: a draft and a target percentage (default 20 percent). Output: the same draft with filler phrases, hedging stacks, and redundant transitions removed — but every claim, number, and quote preserved. Each cut is shown as a strikethrough so you can see what went.

## Why it works

The fastest way to make a draft 20 percent shorter is to delete paragraphs, but that also deletes content. The slowest way is to rewrite end-to-end. In between is the sentence-level pass that removes the 10-15 percent of every paragraph that is purely connective tissue. An LLM is ideal here because it can recognize hedging patterns ('it could be argued that') without needing you to define them.

## How it works

1. Chunk the draft by paragraph. 2. For each paragraph, prompt for sentence-level edits with a strict rule: no claims, numbers, quotes, or section headings may be removed. 3. Enforce the word-count target as a hard constraint in the prompt (reject and retry if output is longer than target). 4. Render the result as a diff — strikethroughs for deletions, green for rewrites. 5. Emit a one-line summary per paragraph explaining what pattern was cut (e.g., 'removed three hedging phrases').