Hi there. In all three--document/paragraph/sentence--one of the things I work on with my clients, as well as use in my own writing, is to use parenthesis to see what's absolutely necessary. For example, put big sections of the doc into parenthesis and see what you can strike out and not miss. When you're applying this to a full document, you must 'kill your darlings', as they say. Use strike-through in the edit suite of any word processing program. It's liberating, you'll be able to see your progress, and it feels great! When working on something smaller, paragraph/sentence, put the part that needs editing, onto it's own page, imagine it's a chopping block and pull words/ideas down to the open space below and re-build the idea using only what's vital. All of this sounds obvious and practical, but it's a great way to be tough on the work. The trap and the beauty of self-editing is we see our work in one way so we must 'break our eye' to our own work--shatter it and re-build. All the best stuff will remain. (I mean, this explanation is already WAY over written, I could have been more judicious, for sure. Let me know if you'd like a session and I'll play devil's advocate as I do with my other clients. We can bash through the work together.)
