Conciseness is usually taught as a technical skill involving clutter, sentence length, and word limits. In workshops, I also describe it as consideration for the reader.
In the grant writing workshops, I ask students to imagine a reviewer reading a SSHRC proposal at 9 PM on a Tuesday after fifteen other proposals. The reviewer may be tired and working outside their sub-field. Clear prose makes the proposal easier to assess.
Readers have finite attention. Clutter makes them spend it decoding the sentence before they can assess the idea.
This gives students a reason for making cuts. They can decide whether a nominalization, a stacked noun phrase, or another hedge is making the reviewer’s job harder.
The same concern runs through other workshops. In journal article revision, I ask whether a reviewer can say yes to the paper. In paraphrasing, I ask whether the source has a clear purpose or leaves the reader to infer why it is there. The reader’s likely conditions are a better test for a cut than an abstract demand to be concise.