Cut It to Length Without Losing the Point

An editing pattern for cutting a piece to a target length where you tell Claude the exact target and, crucially, what must survive the cut — the core point, the call to action, the key example — so it trims aggressively without gutting the message.

'Make it shorter' has no target and no priorities, so Claude shaves a little everywhere and often trims the thing that mattered most. A named length forces real cuts, and a must-keep list tells Claude what's load-bearing versus what's padding. That combination lets it remove the right 40% — the throat-clearing and redundancy — rather than a timid, even shave that keeps the flab and loses the point.

Hard length constraints: an abstract, a character-limited bio, a one-pager, an email that's become a wall. Any time something must get materially shorter and still land.

When the piece is already tight and cutting would remove substance, or when the goal is clarity rather than length — that's a different edit. Don't compress a text that needs to breathe.

Cut this to <target length / word count>. It currently runs long. What must survive the cut: <the core point, the ask, any specific must-keeps>. Everything else is negotiable — remove redundancy, hedging, and throat-clearing first. Show the cut version, then a one-line note on what you removed and why.

A rambling 600-word update must fit 200 words, keeping the deadline change and the decision needed. Claude cuts the recap and the throat-clearing, protects those two points, and lands at 190 words that a busy reader actually absorbs — instead of an even shave that kept the padding and blurred the ask.

Ask for two cut versions at the same length — one that preserves detail and one that preserves tone — so you can choose what to sacrifice. Seeing the trade-off made explicit is faster than editing back and forth toward it.

• Giving no must-keep list, so the cut removes the one line the whole piece existed to deliver.
• Accepting a version that hit the word count by deleting substance rather than padding — check what left.
• Iterating 'shorter, shorter' without a target, which converges slowly and unpredictably.