Does anyone know a good online source for guidelines for shortening journal articles? I've just finished a paper that I'm going to submit soon, but I think it is far too long. Its current length is 30 journal pages. (I know that because I've obsessively figured out what formatting would get me to have 1 word processed page for each journal page of a specific journal.) This is in the humanities.
So I just want some good guidelines for things like "get rid of 'the fact that'." The only such things that I found online were directed at people writing their college-admissions essay, which has to be very short, like 500 words.
Answer
Just to add to the many answers already here, I'll put what I usually do. I'm often quite verborragic while writing, so this is a common problem for me, as we can all see :)
1) Revise every single sentence, not only to remove stuff that is not needed, ("To this end", "such as", ..., I usually use that stuff to "link" ideas while writing, but they are not needed and usually can be cut out without significant change), but also, as said previously here, to better express your points. Be concise.
2) Remove trailing sentences in the end of paragraphs that do not use the full width of the column. Some times you have one or two words dangling on the end of a paragraph that waste a whole line. At one time, I managed to get a little less than half a page of space on a eight page article just by doing that.
3) Check the references. If the journal is not against journal names abbreviations, do it. The same trailing thing applies here as well...
However, those tips only work if you are close to the mark... For instance, one of my articles was reduced from 10 to 8 pages after the first review... We had no choice but to cut content and move it to supplementary material.
Always keep in mind what information you want to convey...
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