Cutting filler from your English: the words to delete on every draft

The Fluff Tax: Why 120-Word Emails Lose Deals and Dilute Authority

You spend twenty minutes drafting an email to an American enterprise client. You choose polite phrases, construct elaborate introductory remarks, and thoroughly explain your reasoning across 125 carefully chosen words. You hit send, confident in your professionalism.

Ten minutes later, your client replies with twelve words: “Sounds great. Let’s proceed with Option B. Send the agreement by Friday.”

When you compare your draft to their response, you wonder why your writing feels so heavy, sluggish, and timid while theirs sounds decisive, energetic, and authoritative. The difference is not grammar; it is the Fluff Tax—the hidden cost of filler words, redundant modifiers, and throat-clearing phrases that pad your sentences without delivering a single byte of new information.

In modern executive communication, brevity is respect. Senior leaders, venture capitalists, and engineering directors receive 150+ emails and 200+ Slack messages every day. If your email requires them to wade through verbal clutter to locate your core thesis, they will not admire your politeness; they will archive your email and move on.

The Psychology of Verbal Padding: Hedging, Deference, and Syntactic Fear

Why do highly intelligent professionals pad their writing with empty words?

In many global business cultures, directness is perceived as aggressive or impolite. Writers instinctively rely on hedging (“I kind of think maybe we should possibly reconsider…”) to soften disagreement and display humility. Second-language professionals also experience syntactic anxiety: when uncertain whether a sentence sounds natural, they insert conversational crutches (“basically,” “essentially,” “as a matter of fact”) to buy cognitive processing time—just as they do in spoken speech.

However, what feels like polite cushioning to the writer reads as insecurity and vagueness to an American executive. Clear, unpadded sentences do not sound rude. They signal intellectual clarity, operational competence, and respect for the reader’s time.

The Five Deadly Categories of Sentence Bloat

Master the Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) Editing Protocol by identifying and purging these five distinct categories of verbal deadweight:

1. Throat-Clearing & Metadiscourse

Metadiscourse is writing about writing: sentences that announce what you are about to say rather than saying it. Delete phrases like “I am writing this email to let you know that,” “As you may already be aware,” and “The purpose of this memo is to demonstrate that.” Cut directly to the insight.

2. Pleonasms and Tautological Redundancies

A pleonasm is an expression that repeats the same concept in two consecutive words. In English, one of the two words is always 100% dead weight:

• “Final outcome” $\rightarrow$ An outcome is by definition final. Write: outcome.
• “Future plans” $\rightarrow$ You cannot plan the past. Write: plans.
• “Revert back / Return back” $\rightarrow$ ‘Re-‘ already means back. Write: reply or return.
• “Past history” $\rightarrow$ History is already in the past. Write: history.
• “Collaborate together” $\rightarrow$ You cannot collaborate alone. Write: collaborate.

3. Syllable-Inflating Modifiers: The ‘Very’ Disease

Adverbs like very, really, extremely, totally, completely, and literally rarely intensify meaning. Instead, they betray a weak underlying adjective. Mark Twain famously advised: “Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very’; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”

• very tired $\rightarrow$ exhausted
• very important $\rightarrow$ critical / essential
• very big $\rightarrow$ massive / substantial
• very bad $\rightarrow$ unacceptable / catastrophic

4. Stacking Apologetic Hedges

One hedge indicates tact; three stacked hedges indicate total lack of conviction. Compare:

• Stacked Hedge: “I just kind of feel like maybe it might be a good idea if we possibly adjusted the deadline.” (19 words)
• Executive Alternative: “I recommend extending the deadline by two days to ensure QA stability.” (12 words)

5. Expletive Constructions (‘There is’ / ‘It is’)

Expletive constructions delay the actual subject of your sentence by opening with empty dummy pronouns like “There are…” or “It is…”

• Flawed: “There are three primary reasons that explain why user retention dropped.”
• Tight: “Three primary factors caused user retention to drop.”

Executive Editing Lab: Slashing an Over-Engineered Project Update

Examine this draft written by a product operations lead, and watch how applying two rigorous editing passes increases punch while cutting word count by 62%:

Raw Draft (84 Words):

“I am just writing this email in order to touch base and basically let you know that there are several very important concerns regarding the new billing architecture that was presented yesterday. In my personal opinion, I think maybe we should hold off on launching going forward until we can collaborate together with the security team to review the final outcome of the pen test.”

The Surgical Deletion Redline:

• I am just writing this email in order to touch base and basically let you know that $\rightarrow$ Cut entire opening throat-clearing (15 words deleted).
• there are several very important concerns regarding $\rightarrow$ Cut expletive opener and weak ‘very’ (replace with “We have critical concerns regarding”).
• that was presented yesterday $\rightarrow$ Tighten to “yesterday’s billing architecture.”
• In my personal opinion, I think maybe $\rightarrow$ Triple hedge redundant. (Cut to “We should”).
• going forward $\rightarrow$ Meaningless corporate buzzword. (Delete).
• collaborate together with $\rightarrow$ Tautology. (Change to “collaborate with” or “consult”).
• final outcome $\rightarrow$ Pleonasm. (Change to “results”).

Final Polished Executive Version (32 Words):

“We have critical concerns regarding yesterday’s proposed billing architecture. We should pause the launch until we review the penetration test results with the security team. Let’s discuss tomorrow at 10 AM.” ✅

Interactive Assessment: Perform an Executive Edit Under Pressure