Cutting a long post: pick the line to keep before you trim

A post on X can be up to 280 characters, but Korean, Japanese and Chinese characters count as two each. Write in one of those languages and you really have about 140 characters. Get all your thoughts down first, and it's common to find the post running about twice the limit, in any language.

The usual move is to trim each sentence a little, and a lot of people say it doesn't get you far. The more you trim, the more awkward the sentences get, and the point you meant to make can blur. So the advice that comes up often is to change the order: decide what to keep before deciding what to cut.

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Pick the line to keep first

Before you touch anything, write in one line the single thing you want the reader to keep. Once you have that line, you can look at every other sentence and ask whether it helps that line or not.

• Some sentences support that line. They are the reasons, examples and conditions that show why the line holds. These stay.
• Other sentences are interesting but about something else. They are thoughts that came up while writing, phrases you worked hard on, or a side story. These come out of this post.

Trimming sentence by sentence shortens everything a little. Choosing this way removes whole sentences, and the ones that stay need less work.

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Don't throw the cut sentences away

Cutting feels wasteful mostly because the cut sentences are good ones. A lot of people say that if you save them somewhere and don't delete them, they often turn into the start of the next post. Two ideas in one post blur each other. Split up, they make two posts.

In the tool I'm building, you can write a thought like that straight into Materials, then later pick that material to create a draft.

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When it still won't fit

If the post is still too long after you've picked the line to keep, the idea may be too big for one post. Then it usually helps more to stop cutting and split it into a thread, or post it first on a channel that allows longer posts.

When you have to shorten a post, where do you start?