You write and gather material—quotes and supporting content that surrounds your argument. Rather than trying to delete portions from what you have, it's better to rewrite from scratch, keeping only the parts essential to your main argument. This approach works because: Loss aversion in practice: A Deleting method. When you want to delete things quickly from a collection. Don't try to delete things that you don't want. Instead select the things you want and batch delete all the other.