Text on a Diet: How to Ruthlessly Cut Out Clichés and Fluff

You finish reading a paragraph, turn the page, and realize you can’t remember a single word. Everything was smooth, decent, and literate. But it’s empty. It’s like you’ve been chewing on cotton wool. This is what watery text is. It exists, but it doesn’t work. It takes up space without leaving a trace. The good news: excess text can be eliminated. The bad news: to do this, you need to learn to see what seems normal.

Why We Write with Fluff

No one sits down at the keyboard thinking, “I’ll write something empty.” Fluff appears for the following reasons:

1. Fear of appearing rude. We think a short answer is impolite. So instead of “delivery in two days,” we write, “We are pleased to inform you that our service offers delivery within two business days.” The politeness is false, the reader’s irritation is real.
2. The desire to sound respectable. Long constructions feel like a sign of expertise. The more complex the sentence, the smarter the author—so many people think. But this is an illusion. True expertise is the ability to explain complex things simply. Everything else is just a disguise.
3. Habit. Clichés become ingrained in our heads because we constantly read them. “Dynamically developing company,” “personalized approach,” “quality first.” These phrases are everywhere, and the brain stops noticing them. And it reproduces them on autopilot.

Replacing automaticity with thoughtful presentation will allow you to remove all unnecessary clutter and preserve the value of the text. This way, you can identify the main enemies of conversion and understand why long texts have become unreadable.

How to spot verbal garbage: top bureaucratic jargon that hinders comprehension

Before you cut, you need to know what exactly to look for. Here are the main categories of garbage:

1. Filler words that mean nothing. “This,” “is,” “is being,” “within the framework of,” “today,” “currently”—all of these can be removed without losing the meaning. Compare: “today the company is the market leader” and “the company is the market leader.” The second version is a third shorter and sounds more confident.
2. Duplicate meaning. “Free gift”—a gift is already free, otherwise it would be a purchase. “Joint collaboration”—collaboration is, by definition, joint. “Preliminary announcement”—an announcement is made before the event; this is its essence. Such constructions don’t enhance the meaning; they dilute it.
3. Subordinate clauses where one word would suffice. “The person who writes the texts”—a copywriter. “A situation in which everything doesn’t go according to plan”—force majeure. “The process during which data is processed”—data processing. Before each “which” and “which” it’s worth asking: can it be replaced with a single noun?
4. Introductions are meaningless. A classic example of this: a first paragraph that gets up to speed before actually getting to the point. “In today’s world of digital communications, content quality is increasingly important” isn’t the beginning of an article, it’s a throat-clearing gesture. The reader has already closed the tab. Start with the point.
5. Enhancers that weaken. “Very,” “extremely,” “maximum,” “absolutely”—these words are supposed to strengthen, but in practice they do the opposite. “A very good product” is weaker than “a product that solves problem X.” The first is an evaluation, the second is an argument. Arguments convince, evaluations don’t.

The passive tense is appropriate when the performer is unknown or unimportant. In other cases, it only obscures the subject and slows down the reading.

Method 1: Removing introductory phrases and obvious statements

Isolate a sentence. Delete it. Has the meaning of the paragraph changed? If not, the sentence is redundant. This also works with individual words.

“This solution is the optimal option for business” → “It’s optimal for business” → “It solves the business problem.” Each pass removes a layer without touching the core.

Important: not all repetition is fluff. Intentional repetition can be rhythm, emphasis, or structure. The question is whether it’s consciously placed or just happened.

Method 2: Replacing complex passive phrases with active verbs

The cheapest and most underrated way to find the essence is to read the text aloud. Not silently, but out loud, slowly, as if you were reading to someone else. Places where the language stumbles are usually syntactic garbage. Places where you yourself are bored are fluff. Places where you yourself can’t clearly explain the purpose of this sentence are candidates for deletion.

The first paragraph is especially telling. If, while reading aloud, you feel like, “Well, here I’m getting too fast,” then the speed needs to be reduced. The reader doesn’t have to wait for you to get up to speed.

Tool: Replace evaluation with fact

Wherever there’s an adjective evaluation, try to include a fact. “High quality service” – what exactly? Average support response time is twelve minutes. Platform rating: 4.9. Repeat purchase rate: 68%. That’s quality, real quality.

“User-friendly interface” – what’s convenient about it? Three steps to checkout. Works without registration. Saves history automatically.

“Wide selection” – how much exactly? Two thousand items? Fifty brands? Updated weekly?

Facts aren’t just removed Water. They build trust. Because they’re verifiable.

What to do with length

A common fear: if you remove the fluff, the text will become too short. This isn’t true. A dense, thousand-character text works better than a watery, three-thousand-character one. Readers don’t judge effort by the number of characters. They evaluate the time spent reading and the benefit they received.

If, after cleaning, the text really is shorter than it should be, it means there were fewer ideas than they thought. This is an honest diagnosis. The cure isn’t adding fluff, but adding meaning: examples, details, clarifications that weren’t there before. Fill the voids with content, not just words.

One principle instead of rules

All the tools, tests, and lists above boil down to one question, which should be asked of each element of the text: why is this here? The golden rule of editing: it’s better not to write than to write too much.