TEXT SHORTENER AND EXPANDER
Make it fit, shorter or longer, with the argument intact
Length Adjustment makes a piece of text shorter or longer without changing what it says.
Before and after
Shorten to fit, or expand to fill
Expanding adds the context a reader is missing, and neither direction is allowed to invent a fact you did not give it.
You wrote
I am writing to inform you that, following our internal review, we have come to the conclusion that the proposal will require a number of further adjustments before it can be approved.
FixMeBot returns
After our review, the proposal needs a few more changes before we can approve it.
You wrote
Launch moved to Q3. Budget unchanged.
FixMeBot returns
We have moved the launch to Q3 to give the team room to finish testing. The budget stays as approved, so no re-forecast is needed.
Shortening starts with the words that carry no information, such as opener boilerplate, stacked hedges and clauses that restate the one before them, and reaches detail last.
What gets cut, and in what order
Shortening is not uniform compression. There is an order, and it is why the first third usually comes off with nothing lost.
- Opener boilerplate. “I am writing to inform you that”, “At this point in time”, “It has come to our attention that”.
- Stacked hedges. “It might possibly be the case that we could perhaps” → “we may”. One hedge is a position; four is a fog.
- Nominalisations. “perform an analysis of” → “analyse”; “make a decision on” → “decide”; “provide assistance to” → “help”. A verb hiding inside a noun costs three extra words.
- Restatement. The clause that says the previous clause again in different words. It is the most common padding in text written to a length.
- Intensifiers. “very”, “really”, “quite”, “extremely”. They add length and subtract force.
- Detail. Only here, and only if the target still demands it.
So a cut of about a third rarely costs a fact, and a cut past half removes things you will miss. A text at a quarter of its length is a summary, and a summary is a Magic Mode instruction: it may drop points, and this tool may not.
Expanding is not padding
Expansion adds information the reader needs and does not have: the reason, the consequence, who does the next thing, what a term means. It does not add adjectives, restate the point, or open with a paragraph about how important the topic is.
Which is the thing to check. If your source does not contain the reason, an expansion that supplies one has invented it. Put the fact into the text before you expand, or into the instruction: “expand to 120 words; the delay is QA capacity, do not invent another cause”.
Expansion also works far better from bullets than from a single line: three bullets give it three things to develop.
Two limits of FixMeBot's own, and one useful asymmetry
The browser extension takes up to 15,000 characters per request; the Telegram chatbot takes 4,096 per message. A long document goes section by section, which is the right unit anyway: an argument shortened whole loses its structure.
The asymmetry worth knowing: only the text you send counts against your character allowance. Shortening a 3,000-character draft costs 3,000 characters of your allowance; expanding a 300-character note into 900 costs 300.
The limits you are usually writing against
| Where | Limit | Roughly |
|---|---|---|
| X post (free accounts) | 280 characters | about 45 words |
| Bluesky post | 300 characters | about 48 words |
| Threads post | 500 characters | about 80 words |
| Mastodon post (default) | 500 characters | about 80 words |
| SMS, single message | 160 characters | about 26 words |
| LinkedIn post | 3,000 characters | about 480 words |
| LinkedIn headline | 220 characters | about 35 words |
| Instagram caption | 2,200 characters | about 350 words |
| Instagram bio | 150 characters | about 24 words |
| Meta description in search results | about 155 characters | about 25 words |
| FixMeBot, one Telegram message | 4,096 characters | about 650 words |
| FixMeBot, one extension request | 15,000 characters | about 2,400 words |
Word counts are converted at about six characters a word, spaces included. That is close enough to plan a draft against, not close enough to submit. Third-party limits move: the counter in the field itself is always the authority.
Updated August 2026
Step by step
How to shorten or expand text with FixMeBot
Both platforms do the same thing in the same order.
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Select the text and pick a direction
Highlight the passage in any field, or send it to the Telegram chatbot, then choose shorter or longer, working one section at a time rather than on a whole document.
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Check the result against the real counter
Paste it back into the field it has to fit and read that field's own character count, because the platform counts links, emoji and line breaks in its own way.
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Run it again, or say the number
If one pass has not gone far enough, run it on the result rather than the original; when the target is an exact figure, state it in Magic Mode: “shorten to under 280 characters, keep the link”.
Can I ask for an exact word or character count?
State the number in a Magic Mode instruction like “shorten to under 280 characters”, rather than expecting a direction to hit a figure. Length Adjustment moves the text one step shorter or longer on each pass, which is what you want when you are trimming, and Magic Mode is what you want when a hard ceiling is the whole requirement.
Does shortening remove facts?
It removes words that carry no fact first: boilerplate openers, stacked hedges, nominalisations and restatement. Detail is the last thing to go, which is why a cut of about a third is usually lossless and a cut past half is worth reading against the original.
How long can the text be?
Up to 15,000 characters per request in the browser extension and 4,096 per message in the Telegram chatbot. Longer pieces go a section at a time, which also produces a better result than resizing a whole document in one pass.
Does expanding cost me twice as much allowance?
No. Only the text you send counts against your character allowance, so a 300-character note expanded into 900 characters costs 300. The returned text is always free, in both directions.
Write it once. Send it right.
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