Cut the deadwood out, Mr Editor

We shot 5 hours of footage. After cutting the deadwood out on the editing table, the movie released was only 2 hours 15 minutes long.

One of the hallmarks of good English communication is the economy of language. You say what you want to say in minimum words. That is the reason why you should cut out the deadwood from your essay and make it sharper.

Can you guess what could, “Cutting out the deadwood mean”? If you didn’t get it, well, that’s the phrase we are discussing in this post.

Deadwood is useless. So, cutting out the deadwood means chopping off the useless bit from something – it could be a piece of writing or a movie or it could refer to removing useless people from the company. The idea is to prune away the worthless – the phrase starts from a tree/jungle metaphor but can be used in almost any context.

Let’s take some examples:

1. I think you can say all that you want to in 2 pages and you have made this report 5 pages long. Cut out the deadwood please. The directors would not have time to go through all this.
2. With recession in the economy, the company has gone on a cost cutting drive. The HR managers have been asked to cut out the deadwood. You should expect many lay offs in the coming months.
3. I think a ministry of the size of 150 is a huge huge drag on the state funds. You should streamline the administration and cut out the deadwood.

Cut out and throw the wasteful, that’s the idea of cutting out the deadwood. Some more examples:

1. The company headcount needs rationalization. Cut out the deadwood.
2. The entire film was a 5 hour long footage. On the editing table, we cut out the deadwood. Infact, we were ruthless with our cuts. Only those scenes were included which brought the story forward. The entire footage was cut short to a 2 hours 15 minutes movie.
3. The management committee doesn’t need 15 people. At least half of them are unnecessary. We will cut out the deadwood by the next week.