The sentences you delete are often doing more work than the ones you keep. Jain philosophy has a concept called anekāntavāda — the doctrine that reality has multiple, simultaneous valid aspects — and one of its corollaries is that every statement you make excludes something true. Good writers know this intuitively: the moment you commit to a sentence, you've killed all the other sentences it could have been. The psychologist George Miller showed in the 1950s that working memory holds roughly seven chunks of information at once, which means a reader tracking a dense paragraph is already at cognitive capacity before your best point arrives. Put those two ideas together and you get a discipline: write the full version, then cut not what's wrong, but what's competing with your sharpest thought. The sentence that survives shouldn't just be accurate — it should be the one whose deletion would hurt most.

In your last piece of writing, what did you leave in because cutting it felt like losing effort — not because it was earning its place?

Drawing from Jain philosophy (Anekāntavāda) combined with cognitive psychology — Māllisena (systematizer of anekāntavāda), with reference to George Miller's working memory research