What to Cut When the Letter Runs Long

A letter running to 600 words is rarely long because you had too much to say. It’s long because a third of it is connective tissue, self-description, and sentences that announce what the next sentence will do.

Cut in a fixed order and you’ll lose that third without touching a single piece of evidence. Here is the order.

1. The opening throat-clear

Delete your first sentence and read what’s left. Roughly half the time the second sentence was always the opening, and the first was you warming up in public.

I am writing to express my strong interest in the Senior Analyst position advertised on your careers page. Twenty words that duplicate the subject line and the form. Gone. See write a first sentence only you could write.

2. Every self-descriptive adjective

Hunt these specifically: motivated, passionate, detail-oriented, results-driven, dedicated, dynamic, proven, seasoned, strong (as in strong communication skills), excellent, exceptional.

Every one is an assertion about yourself offered as evidence. Deleting them costs nothing because they carried nothing, and the sentence usually improves structurally as well — I am a detail-oriented analyst with strong stakeholder management skills deletes to nothing, and its replacement is a fact.

3. The phrases that exist to fill space

Search and destroy:

in order to → to
at this point in time → now
has the ability to → can
it is worth noting that → delete
I would like to take this opportunity to → delete
in terms of → usually deletable entirely
utilise → use
with regard to → about
I believe that, I feel that, in my opinion → delete; it’s your letter, everything in it is your view
very, quite, really, truly, actually → delete on sight

This pass alone typically removes 40 to 70 words from a 500-word letter, and nothing is lost.

4. The requirements you’re covering second and third

Now it gets substantive. Most long letters are long because paragraph two tries to answer three requirements instead of one.

Pick the strongest, cut the others entirely. One requirement answered with a real story and a real outcome beats three listed with a clause each — a list of three shallow matches reads as a survey of yourself, and a survey is what the resume already is.

This is the biggest single cut available and the one people resist hardest. Do it anyway. How to read a job posting is about making this choice deliberately rather than under duress.

5. Anything already on the resume in the same form

If a sentence restates a job title, a date range, a degree, or an employer without adding anything, cut it. The reader has the resume attached to the same message.

The exception is a fact the resume systematically undersells — a project that sat inside a job title that doesn’t reveal it. Then the letter is the only place it can live, and it stays.

6. Your own history before the relevant part

Letters often begin the story too early. After completing my degree in 2016, I joined Halloran as a junior analyst, where I spent two years before moving into… — a chronology, ending at the part that matters.

Start at the part that matters. Career narrative is the resume’s job, and the letter’s job is one argument.

7. The company-flattery paragraph

If a whole paragraph is about your admiration for their mission, it can go with no loss whatsoever, and the letter gets sharper. What replaces it, if anything, is one sentence about the work — named specifically, with no evaluative adjective attached.

8. Explanations of your own structure

In this letter I will outline my relevant experience before addressing my motivation for applying. You have four paragraphs. No signposting required. Similarly As mentioned above, As you can see from my CV, and To summarise in a document that is already a summary.

9. The closing paragraph, down to two sentences

Gratitude for consideration, hopes of hearing back, and a request not to hesitate — all three go. What remains is a real question about the work and an offer to talk. Two sentences, and it’s a better close than the one you cut.

What survives

After all nine passes, a 600-word letter is usually around 300, containing:

One sentence naming what you’re applying for and the most relevant fact about you.
One paragraph of concrete evidence for a single requirement, with real specifics.
Two or three sentences of judgement about the work.
A question and a sign-off.

That’s the shape in the four-paragraph letter, arrived at from the other direction. If cutting has produced something shorter than 250 words and it still contains all four elements, that’s not too short — that’s a good letter.

The one thing not to cut

Specifics. Numbers, names of systems, team sizes, timescales, the odd detail that could only come from having been there.

There’s a temptation when cutting to remove the concrete details because they feel like decoration and keep the summary sentences because they feel like substance. It’s exactly backwards. Three regional teams, six weeks, four days to one is the evidence; I successfully delivered a complex cross-functional initiative is the decoration, and it’s longer.

If you have to lose a specific to hit a limit, lose a whole element instead — drop the judgement paragraph, or the closing question — and keep the remaining elements concrete. A short letter with three real facts in it works. A letter of the correct length made entirely of summary does not.

When it’s still too long

Then the constraint is a hard one, and the discipline of a very small box is genuinely clarifying. Write the 300-character version, see what you instinctively kept, and rebuild upward from that — outreach in three hundred characters is the same exercise done deliberately. What survives at 300 characters is what the letter was always about.