Be authoritative. Tell your readers what they need to know, not what you might ideally like them to know. Tell them also what they need to think about it.

Save your readers time. If you are summarising a file of documents for them, you do not need to give them the experience of reading it themselves. Don’t use a piece of writing as a dumping ground for evidence; use the evidence sparingly to illustrate your argument.

Pick your battles. You may need to prove some points laboriously, especially if the ground is controversial. But you can’t do this across the board. Work out where a blow-by-blow account is necessary and where a simple allusion will suffice.

Don’t include details just because they are fun or interesting. If they don’t serve your argument or your story, they should go.

Observe the 5% rule. Any text, whether it’s a 1,000-page novel or a tweet, can be reduced by 5% without serious sacrifice of meaning. In fact, the true percentage is probably higher …