In general, be on the lookout for lengthy, obscure sentences; wordiness; pretentiousness; overuse of the passive voice; and imprecise language. Read your work aloud, noting the parts where you stumble or misread and the parts that sound dull and boring, even to you. Pump more energy into those parts by substituting action verbs and concrete nouns.

Then, use this three step process to tighten up the style:

• Cut. Eliminate words or phrases that don't pull their weight.
• Rearrange. Put the ideas you want to emphasize at the beginning or the end of sentences, the places of natural emphasis.
• Rewrite. If cutting and rearranging don't work, take more drastic action: scrap the sentence and try it again. Imagine your reader confronting you with, "What are you trying to tell me here?" and then write your answer to that question as directly as you can.

Apply these remedies to every swollen section or infected sentence. All you need is a red pen. Cross out words and phrases that don't say anything. Draw arrows to rearrange words or sentences. Cut out sections that contain irrelevant information. If you need to get it off your computer screen to really see it, print it off. Then you can literally use scissors to cut out the whole paragraphs and use tape to put them in a different order. Rewrite only when editing or rearranging are not effective.