When I finish an article, I put it aside and work on something else for a little while. I then go back to the just-finished piece and read it through. I'm looking, of course, for errors and omissions. But I'm also looking for words which can and should be removed.
If you're struggling to make your writing tighter, or battling to get the wordcount down to what your editor wants, take a close look at every the and that. A good many of them can be done away with, you'll find. In the two examples below (from a writing project I finished a few days ago) the words in bold can be dropped:
Of
all the festivals, my personal favorite is the Nantou City
Sand Sculpture Festival.
