Cut It by a Third

The second draft · Page 1 of 2

Name Date
DIRECTIONS: Cross out on the page until this draft is under budget. Page 2 needs a draft of your own (anything you have written, or one from english-06-daily-writing).
Cut these first: 1. the run-up before the real first sentence; 2. a sentence that repeats the one before; 3. the announcement (in this piece I am going to explain…).

Why I Stopped Playing in Goal

1I have played soccer since I was six, or seven — my mom says six and my brother says seven, and he was actually there. 2We have had four coaches and two different uniforms in that time, and I have kept every one of the uniforms in a drawer. 3None of that is what I want to write about. 4In this piece I am going to explain why I quit playing in goal and what I do now instead.

5A goalkeeper is the only person on the field who is alone. 6Everybody else has somebody within ten yards of them, shouting or being shouted at. 7You stand in a rectangle of chalk for eighty minutes and wait for the game to become your problem, and when it does, it is your problem entirely. 8For three seasons I liked that.

9Then we played Ridgeway in October and I let in a goal I should have had. 10It was not a hard shot to stop. 11It was, honestly, an easy one, and I did not stop it. 12Nobody said anything, which was worse than if they had. 13My coach put his hand on my shoulder afterward and told me that goalkeepers have short memories, which is the kind of thing people say when they can see that you do not have one.

14I played four more games and then asked to move to defense. 15I am not as good there. 16I get tired in a way I never did in goal, and twice this season I have been the reason we gave up a goal. 17But when it happens now there are nine other people it also happened to, and that turns out to be the whole difference. 18I did not stop playing in goal because I was bad at it. 19I stopped because I was tired of being the only one it happened to.

312 words. Get it under 210. That is a third gone.
  1. The piece does not start where it starts. Find the sentence it really begins at and cross out everything before it. Which sentences went?
  2. Find the announcement and cross it out. Then check: does the piece still explain the thing it promised to explain?

Cut It by a Third — and now yours

The second draft · Page 2 of 2

DIRECTIONS: Questions 3 and 4: the draft on page 1. Then your own draft.
  1. Two sentences next to each other say the same thing. Cross out the weaker one — and say what the one you kept does that the other did not.
  2. You are still over the budget. The three named faults never get you all the way there. Find the rest yourself, then write down the one cut you argued with yourself about.
Your draft. Count it before you touch it.
Words now   Two-thirds of that   Words after
The three faults first. Cross out; don’t rewrite.
What I cutAbout how many wordsWhat the piece lost by losing it
The honest one:
Is there anything on that list where the answer in the last column was nothing at all? Say which, and how long it had been in there.