The post you want is nine hundred words. The video is forty seconds, which is about a hundred and ten words of narration. So roughly seven words in eight have to go, and the order you remove them in is the difference between a tight story and a confusing one.

The instinct is to speed the voice up. It buys maybe fifteen percent and costs comprehension, which is a bad trade in a format where people are half-watching on mute.

What a 40-second script is made of

A hundred and ten words, give or take, arranged as short lines rather than paragraphs. Roughly: fifteen words of hook, sixty of situation, twenty of turn, fifteen of payoff. That is not a rule, it is a shape, and having a shape in mind makes the cutting decisions obvious instead of agonizing.

Everything below is in service of getting nine hundred words into that shape without the story falling apart.

Cut in this order

Every name. Reddit posts are full of them, often with ages and initials attached, and none of them survive contact with audio. "My sister" and "her husband" are instantly clear; "my SIL Jessica (34F) and her husband Mark (36M)" is four seconds of nothing. If you need to distinguish two people in the same role, one becomes "my older sister".

The backstory paragraph. Almost every post has one, it usually starts with "for context", and it almost never earns its place at this length. If the story genuinely does not work without it, compress the whole thing to one clause and attach it to a line that was going to exist anyway.

Every second example. Posts list three instances of the same behavior because the author is building a case for the commenters. You are not building a case. One instance, chosen for being the most specific, does the same job in a third of the time.

Hedging and self-defense. "I know this sounds petty, but", "I've always tried to be reasonable", "before anyone says anything". The author is anticipating judgment from a comment section your viewer will never see.

The edits and updates. ETA, EDIT, UPDATE 2 — unless the update is the payoff, in which case it might be the whole video and the original post is the setup.

Dialogue attribution. "She said that" and "I told her that" can nearly always go. Say the line. A change of voice is implied by the fact that a different thing is being said.

What has to survive

Two things, and if either one dies in the edit the video does not work no matter how clean the rest is.

The turn has to be legible. Whatever sentence contains the flip needs to arrive with enough context that the viewer understands what just changed. If your cutting has removed the setup that makes the turn land, you cut the wrong thing and you should put twenty words back.

The concrete details have to survive. Not all of them — the two or three that make it feel like a real event rather than a summary of one. The invoice. The couch. The 2am cat. These are the first thing writers cut because they look like decoration, and they are actually load-bearing: they are what the viewer remembers and what the reaction meme has to grab onto.

Rewrite the connective tissue

Once you have removed seven eighths of the words, what remains does not flow, because you have removed the joins along with everything else. This is the step people skip, and it is why heavily cut scripts sound like someone reading bullet points.

Rewriting a Reddit post into short spoken lines is not the same as deleting from it. Take the surviving beats and write them fresh in the voice you want, in lines of eight to twelve words, one beat each. It goes faster than editing does, and the result sounds like a person telling a story rather than a summary being read aloud.

At which point it is worth noticing that you have effectively rewritten the post. That is not a problem to solve, it is the job, and it has an obvious implication for where the material comes from in the first place.

Line length is structural, not stylistic

Short lines are not just easier to listen to. In an automated pipeline each line is a segment, and each segment is a place a reaction meme can be placed. A wall-of-text paragraph gives the tool exactly one placement for what might be four separate jokes.

So "one beat per line" is doing double duty: it is how spoken narration breathes, and it is what gives the timing engine somewhere to work. Twelve short lines beat four long ones on both counts.

When to give up on a post

If cutting to a hundred and ten words destroys the turn, the post is a three-minute video, not a Short. ProRevenge is full of these — long arcs where the satisfaction comes from accumulation, and any cut that fits forty seconds throws away the reason the story is good.

Do not force it. Pick a shorter post. The cost of abandoning a post is a few minutes; the cost of publishing a mangled one is a video that gets no watch time and teaches the algorithm your channel is not worth showing.

How Memecut does this

The cutting stays manual, because it is a judgment call about what the story is. What happens after it is not.

Paste the finished hundred-and-ten-word script and voice, word-level captions, and meme matching run per line, automatically. That matters for this specific task because it makes the cut cheap to test: a version that keeps the backstory and a version that drops it are two pastes, not two editing sessions, and you can watch both and see which one holds.

What to remember

Aim for about a hundred and ten words in the shape hook, situation, turn, payoff. Cut names, backstory, repeated examples, hedging, and dialogue attribution, in that order. Protect the turn and two or three concrete details. Then rewrite what is left into short spoken lines rather than trimming the original, because short lines are what both the ear and the meme timing need. If the turn cannot survive the cut, pick a different post — and test the two versions rather than guessing which one held.