Analyzing draft speak to craft radically concise text

摘要

The term draft speak references common turns-of-phrase that writers instinctively use when first working out their message. Such writing turns out longer and less clear than readers generally prefer. Increasingly, readers view texts on screens of limited size, smartphones and tablets where clear but concise text minimizes panning/scrolling. However, writers are typically instructed to "be concise" without adequate text-analysis tools to create concision, except by intuition and time-consuming trial and error. This paper discusses grammatical structures that writers can consciously target to optimize text concision.