The Paramedic Method: How to Cut 30% of Words From Any Business Email
The Paramedic Method is a six-step editing protocol that cuts 30% of words from any business email — with a full before-and-after example.
I’m Bryan Collins. I’ve taught writing for over seven years, edited business writing as a ghostwriter, and rewritten thousands of my own emails to a 10,900-person list. The single technique that cuts the most words from any draft — without losing meaning — is the Paramedic Method. It comes from Richard Lanham, a writing professor at UCLA. I’ve adapted it for business email. Here is exactly how I run it.
TL;DR
The Paramedic Method is a six-step editing protocol. You mark the prepositions, mark the weak “to be” verbs, find the real action, rewrite around it, cut the wind-up at the start, and read the result aloud. On a typical business email, it removes 25-35% of the words. Your meaning survives. Your reader’s attention does too.
Why business emails get bloated
Most business emails drift long for three reasons.
First, wind-up phrases. Openings like “I would like to take this opportunity to” or “I am writing to inform you that” add nothing.
Second, passive constructions. “The report has been completed by the team” is six words longer than “The team completed the report.”
Third, nominalisations — verbs trapped inside nouns. “Conduct an analysis of the data” is the noun version of “analyse the data.”
Some L1 backgrounds amplify this. Romance-language and South Asian English business registers often default to longer, more formal constructions because that signals respect in the source culture. In English business writing, brevity reads as confidence, not rudeness. The pattern is real. Naming it is the first step in editing past it.
The six steps, in plain language
Lanham’s original method has six steps. Here is the version I use on business email.
- Circle the prepositions. Mark every of, in, on, at, for, with, by, from, to, about. Strings of prepositional phrases drag a sentence out. If you see three or more in one sentence, you have rewrite candidates.
- Circle the forms of “to be”. Mark every is, are, was, were, be, been, being. These often signal that the real verb is hiding inside a nearby noun.
- Find the action. Ask: “Who is doing what to whom?” Write the answer in one short sentence in your head before you touch the keyboard.
- Put the action in a simple active verb. Move the doer to the front. Replace the buried noun with the verb it came from. “Made a decision” becomes “decided.”
- Start fast. Cut the wind-up at the start of the sentence. Most emails can lose their first six to twelve words and read better.
- Read it aloud. If you stumble, the sentence is still too long or too noun-heavy. Cut again.
Run all six steps on the first paragraph of any email before you send it. That paragraph carries most of the meaning. It is also where wind-up collects.
Before and after: a real project update
Here is a draft from “Lin”, a product manager updating her director on a blocker.
Before (162 words):
Hi Sarah, I hope this email finds you well and that you had a restful weekend. I am writing to provide you with an update in relation to the integration project that was discussed in the steering meeting on Tuesday. At this point in time, it has been identified by the engineering team that there is a dependency on the data warehouse team for the completion of the schema migration, which is a prerequisite for the testing of the new API endpoints. The current status of the work is that the schema migration has not yet been started by the data warehouse team, which is going to have an impact on the delivery date that was agreed upon at the start of the quarter. I would like to take this opportunity to ask whether you would be able to assist with the escalation of this matter to the data warehouse lead. Thank you so much for your time and consideration on this.
After (98 words — 40% shorter):
Hi Sarah, the integration project is blocked. Engineering needs the data warehouse team to finish the schema migration before we can test the new API endpoints. The warehouse team hasn’t started yet, which puts our quarter-end delivery date at risk. Could you escalate this with the warehouse lead this week? A short note from you carries more weight than another reminder from me. I’ll send a one-page status to both of you on Friday either way. Thanks.
Six edits did the heavy lifting:
- “I hope this email finds you well…” → cut wind-up (step 5).
- “It has been identified by the engineering team” → “Engineering needs” — active verb, named doer (steps 2 and 4).
- “There is a dependency on… for the completion of” → “needs… to finish” — preposition pile-up collapsed into one verb (steps 1 and 4).
- “Has not yet been started by the data warehouse team” → “The warehouse team hasn’t started” — active voice (step 4).
- “Would you be able to assist with the escalation of this matter” → “Could you escalate this” — nominalisation back to verb (step 4).
- “Thank you so much for your time and consideration on this” → “Thanks” — wind-down trimmed (step 5).
The meaning survived every cut. The ask is now in the first two lines.
What you save by doing this
Reader time is the obvious gain. The deeper gain is decision speed.
Most business emails over 200 words lose half their readers by the third paragraph. A director with thirty emails to clear before lunch will scan, not read. If your ask is in paragraph four, it loses to the email that put the ask in paragraph one.
The Paramedic Method also forces you to know what you are asking for. Step 3 — “Who is doing what?” — is harder than it sounds. If you cannot answer it in one sentence, the email is not ready to send. The edit is also the diagnostic.
What the Paramedic Method does not do
It will not fix tone. A cut-down email can still sound cold, defensive, or over-familiar. Politeness register is a separate problem.
It will not fix grammar. The method assumes the underlying sentences are correct. Articles, prepositions, and verb tense errors slip through.
It will not flag culturally awkward phrasing. Direct translations from another language can read as off even after the wind-up is gone.
For grammar and tone, run the cut-down draft through a tool. I compare two of the most common in Grammarly vs Hemingway Editor. For the deeper L1 patterns — over-apologising, over-explaining, qualifier stacking — see 10 common email mistakes non-native English speakers make.
The Paramedic Method is the first pass. It removes the noise so the real problems become easier to see.