The future belongs to the best editors

This is a line from an excellent article in Jason Fried blog, founder of 37Signals who have led the way in SaaS web development since 2004.

Jason speaks of the need to summarise what we write:

I don’t care about the topic. I care about the editing. I care about the constant refinement and compression. I care about taking three pages and turning it into one page. Then from one page into three paragraphs. Then from three paragraphs into one paragraph. And finally, from one paragraph into one perfectly distilled sentence.

Along the way you’d trade detail for brevity. Hopefully adding clarity at each point. This is important because I believe editing is an essential skill that is often overlooked and under appreciated. The future belongs to the best editors.

Business Proposals and Business Plans

This editing skill is vital for our proposal documents and our business plans.

By learning how to edit, we force ourselves to consider priorities. What's important for me may not be so important for my reader.

By all means, let's give ourselves the luxury of as many words as we like in our first draft, when thoughts are first emerging. But before we send the business proposal, before we publish the business plan, what else can be removed to enable the document to have more impact?