Free Text Shortener

Cutting text is an editing discipline with a strict order of operations: filler goes first, redundancy second, weak examples third — and claims, numbers, and hedges go nowhere. This text shortener applies that hierarchy at three depths, so a light trim polishes while an aggressive cut decides what the passage is fundamentally about.

It compresses your existing sentences rather than writing a new summary of them. The voice stays yours; the fat doesn't.

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Conversion Steps

Paste the over-limit text — an abstract, an answer field, a section running long.

Pick a depth: Light removes redundancy only, Cut ~50% halves it, Cut ~75% keeps essential claims alone.

Run the pass and check the survivors: every number, name, and qualifying hedge should still be present.

Count the result against your limit; if it overshoots, drop one depth rather than hand-editing blindly.

Give the ending a second look — compression tends to strand conclusions that referenced cut material.

Before / After

Before	After
There are, it seems to me, a number of fairly significant reasons why our onboarding process, which we originally designed back in 2019 and have modified somewhat informally ever since, tends to overwhelm new users during their first week, leading in many cases to early churn that we could likely reduce with a redesigned checklist.	Our 2019 onboarding process overwhelms new users in week one, driving early churn. A redesigned checklist would likely reduce it.

Depth: Cut ~50%

Who Uses This, and Why

Abstracts and submission caps: Conference abstracts capped at 250 words reach size with the methodology sentence defended and the background trimmed instead.
Application form fields: Grant portals and job systems that silently truncate at 500 characters receive text shaped to fit, not amputated mid-clause.
Executive summaries: Ten-page reports distilled to the half-page leadership actually reads, with recommendations intact and evidence cited by section.
Speech timing cuts: A seven-minute toast squeezed to five by removing anecdotes in reverse order of laughs received.
Social-format adaptation: Newsletter paragraphs rebroken for platforms where 280 or 500 characters is the entire canvas.
Self-editing flabby drafts: Writers who overwrite on the first pass use Light trim as a routine second-draft filter before deeper structural edits.

How It Compares to Alternatives

Summarizers change genres: they read your document and write about it from outside, producing third-person distillations. A shortener stays inside your text — same sentences, same stance, same address to the reader, simply denser. Truncation, the other alternative, is worse than either: it deletes from the bottom up, which is how conclusions vanish and sentences end mid-. Depth control matters too — most tools offer one invisible compression setting; here you choose the ratio and can predict what each level will sacrifice.

Pro Tips From Heavy Users

Cut in two shallow passes rather than one deep one — you'll keep details the deep pass would sweep away wholesale.
Protect one concrete detail per paragraph; specificity is what compression erodes first and misses most.
Recount with a word counter after every pass — percentage targets drift once punctuation-heavy sentences collapse.
Read the final two sentences first; stranded conclusions are the signature of a rushed trim.

Frequently Asked Questions

How is this different from a summarizer?

Genre. Summaries describe a document from outside ('The author argues…'); shortened text remains your prose, addressed to your reader, just tighter. Use the summarizer for distillations and this for fitting your own words into a limit.

Will names and numbers always survive?

They're protected at every depth — deleting a statistic during compression would misrepresent the passage. If output still exceeds the limit with figures intact, drop another depth rather than hand-deleting data.

Which depth fits a 30% reduction?

Neither extreme on its own — run Light trim first, recount, then apply Cut ~50% to the remainder if needed. Stepped cuts preserve more of your voice than one deep pass.

Does it preserve formatting and lists?

Lists usually compact into fewer items or flowing prose, whichever saves more. If a bulleted structure is required by the destination, keep the input list short and verify the shape survived before accepting.

Can it hit an exact word count?

It targets the chosen percentage, not an exact figure. For precision, undershoot with a deeper cut, then spend a few words restoring the best trimmed phrase.

Is shortened text safe to submit as my own writing?

Yes — compressing your own drafting is ordinary editing. The usual integrity rules apply elsewhere: shortening a source to disguise quotation is still quotation and still needs citation.