Conciseness is usually taught as a technical skill: cut clutter, tighten the prose, respect the word limit. In workshops, I also describe it as consideration for the reader.
The version I use in the grant writing workshops goes like this. Your reviewer is reading your SSHRC proposal at 9 PM on a Tuesday. They’ve read fifteen proposals that day. They are tired. They are evaluating work outside their sub-field. They are looking for clear signals of feasibility and significance, and they do not have the energy to excavate your meaning from a thicket of text.
Concision respects finite attention. Remove enough clutter and the reviewer can spend more energy on the idea and less on decoding the sentence.
This changes how students approach revision. “Make it shorter” sounds like subtraction. “Make it easier for a tired person to see your point” gives the cuts a purpose. The work is similar: cut nominalizations, unstack noun phrases, and trim hedge words.
I notice the same thing running through the other workshops. In journal article revision: can a reviewer say yes to this? In paraphrasing: is the source doing work for the reader, or is the reader doing work to figure out why the source is there?
In each case, consider whether the person reading can follow the argument.