What is Shorten mode?
Shorten mode cuts a paragraph to roughly half its length while keeping the meaning intact. Every key point in the input survives in the output; what disappears is throat-clearing, repetition, redundant qualifiers, and the second sentence that says what the first one already said. The compression target is 40-60% of input length depending on how much slack the original carried.
This is the mode to pick when the paragraph is roughly twice as long as it needs to be. You wrote it in one pass without editing, or you inherited it from a draft that was trying to hit a higher word count, or you're writing for a venue with a hard length limit and the current paragraph won't fit. Shorten preserves the points; it removes the words spent saying them.
When to use Shorten mode
The most common case: hitting a word count from above. Your essay is 1,800 words and the limit is 1,500, and one paragraph is doing the most damage. Run it through Shorten at Medium strength and you'll get three versions in the 50% range that say the same thing. Pick the keeper, paste it back, and recheck the count.
Other good fits: condensing background sections in a research paper, trimming the setup of a blog post that takes too long to get to the point, shortening LinkedIn posts that hit the "see more" cutoff in a bad place, tightening introductions that throat-clear before the first real claim, condensing FAQ answers that originally read like legal copy.
Shorten is the wrong call when the paragraph isn't actually long — it's just stiff or in the wrong register. For those, Standard, Formal, or Casual are the right modes. Length is a separate axis, and the paraphrasing tool handles wording-level work without touching length.
How Shorten mode compares to other modes
Shorten is the only mode that aggressively reduces length. Standard, Formal, Casual, and Academic all preserve length by default — they edit at the wording and register level. Expand is the opposite of Shorten and grows the paragraph by roughly 1.5×.
What about strength? Subtle Shorten cuts maybe 25-30% and only trims clear redundancy. Medium hits the 50% target. Aggressive will go further, sometimes 60-70%, and in the process may merge sentences and drop sub-points it judges as supporting detail. Aggressive is the right pick when you need maximum compression and accept that the output will read more like a summary than a rewrite.
When you need to cut more than half, run Shorten twice on the output of the first pass. Two Medium passes usually beat one Aggressive pass.