How to shorten an article before submitting to a journal Does anyone know a good online source for guidelines for shortening journal articles?  I've just finished a paper that I'm going to submit soon, but I think it is far too long.  Its current length is 30 journal pages.  (I know that because I've obsessively figured out what formatting would get me to have 1 word processed page for each journal page of a specific journal.)  This is in the humanities.

So I just want some good guidelines for things like "get rid of 'the fact that'."  The only such things that I found online were directed at people writing their college-admissions essay, which has to be very short, like 500 words.
In my experience, I have found there are four main strategies for reducing the length of a paper.  In order of most to least radical, they are:


Write a different paper.  For example, one of my recently accepted papers really wanted to be about four times as long as the page limit, and also would have required at least another month of work beyond the deadline in order to properly complete.  When this became clear, it was time for radical surgery: most of the original manuscript was pushed off into future work and only the first key result was expanded into the full presentation it deserved.  We added the word "Toward" to the front of the title and started working on the follow-up paper that contains the rest of the work.
Drop significant chunks of the paper. A slightly less radical version of the first, it may be that you can keep the narrative and main results, but drop some of the secondary explorations entirely.  This is the course I dislike most, because it can significantly weaken the work and "less important" dropped sections are unlikely to be able to form a separate publication on their own.  This can work, however, for a conference publication that will be followed by an extended journal version (e.g., the conference version sketches an analysis of less important properties of the system being studied, while the journal version contains full exhaustive proofs).
Shove things into supplementary material. If you're submitting to a journal, it's typically possible to put unlimited amounts of information into the supplementary material.  This can be a win-win situation, in which you drop significant chunks of the paper without actually omitting them, just tucking them off where only those who really care will read them.
Squeeze blood from a stone. Careful and thorough editing can often remove a remarkable amount of length from a paper, but it's a very time consuming and painful process.  I can typically halve the length of a manuscript without omitting anything simply by dint of streamlining the presentation down to the level of individual words and phrases.  Cutting 10% is not too hard for a native speaker with enough time to invest; getting all the way to 50% is an exhaustive exercise in scientific haiku. Usually, it's better to use one of the more radical but less painful strategies instead, but I have had special occasions where squeezing blood from a stone was the right approach.


I actually recommend that your consideration move from most to least radical, the reason being that the more radical actions are often actually easier, because they require less precision.