Removing Extraneous Information

While it seems kind of obvious, removing information not critical to communication
can come in handy when writing or editing text for the Web. This relates back to
the idea of chunking information. Once youve got the chunks, you can look a little
more closely at the text and see if theres anything you can get rid of, or if you can
rewrite the paragraph to be leaner and meaner.
Consider the following “chunked” paragraph from the earlier example.
The river flows year round now that the pumps are out of the ground, and we hope
that the flow will continue to increase and benefit several miles of the river downstream
as well.
Any language that doesnt relate to the heart of the discussion, is in a somewhat
confusing order, or adds extraneous detail can be removed.
Now that the pumps have been removed, the river flows year round. Hopefully, the
flow will continue to increase as it benefits several miles of the river.
I reduced the paragraph by seven words, improved its pace, and made its main
idea more prominent.
In the case of writing for the Web, less is almost always more.