How do I cut an essay down to the word limit without losing meaning?

When I have to cut a draft fast, I do one thing before anything else: I find every sentence that starts with "It is" or "There are" and rewrite it. "It is important to note that the experiment failed" becomes "The experiment failed." "There are many reasons the policy worked" becomes "The policy worked for many reasons." "It" and "there" as sentence-openers are almost always delay mechanisms. Removing them saves words and, as a bonus, makes the sentence punchier. That single move will usually save you 5–10% of a draft. Combined with deleting "very" and "really" from everywhere, you'll hit 15% without even looking at content. That's often enough to get under a word limit without cutting a single idea.

Students want to cut sentences instead of paragraphs because cutting a paragraph feels violent. But trimming individual sentences usually damages the best paragraphs along with the weakest ones, and the net effect is an essay that's tighter but duller. Cutting the weakest paragraph outright is the opposite — it removes the part that was already dragging the grade down, and it leaves the strong parts untouched. The way to find your weakest paragraph: read each body paragraph's first and last sentence only. The weakest paragraph is usually the one where the first and last sentence barely relate to each other, or where the topic sentence is fuzzy. That's your cut. The grader won't miss it, and you'll save 150–250 words in one move.