Strip your idea down to the basics. Ensure all your elements are in place to avoid incomplete ideas and fragments. Each sentence requires a subject, the "who or what," and a predicate, the information about the subject, such as what the subject is doing. For example, start with something as simple as: "The boy ran."
Decide if further clarification is needed. Adjectives and adverbs clutter a sentence and actually weaken it even though you are using more words. Instead, use stronger words to describe your subject or the action your subject is taking. For example, use: "The boy sprinted," instead of "The boy ran fast."
Combine sentences to make the writing flow. By the time you insert the period, the reader should be able to mentally establish the end, as if he can sense a stop sign ahead. Some phrases and sentences feed off each other; they can be combined to make a complete thought. For example, "The boy ran home," versus "The boy ran. He went home."
Avoid wordiness. Verbosity inserts extra words into your sentences that serve no other function than to bloat your original thought. Edit these sentences with diligence. For example, try "The anxious boy raced the streetlight on his way home," instead of "Trying to get home in time for his curfew, the boy sprinted quickly on the street toward his home on the corner of late and really late."
Avoid cliches that restate the obvious or water down your prose. For example, "If you ask me," "in a manner of speaking," "it seems to me," "for all intents and purposes," are unnecessary phrases. Get straight to your point instead. Cliches steal originality from your writing and are best omitted.
Prune redundancy by getting rid of words that say the same thing twice. For example, "each and every," should be replaced with "each," "12 midnight" and "12 noon," or "midnight" or "noon." Omit phrases like "a total of," "a person who," "a thing that," or "the fact of the matter is."
Write sentences in different ways with different words to see which is the strongest presentation. For example, "I startled when the dog barked," versus, "When the dog barked, I jumped in fright."