I clerked for a judge who helped us become really good writers. I know this is shocking to some, but some judges actually really do care and don't try to write thousands of pages. He really cared about trying to write opinions everyone could read and understand.
We would all get together as clerks, read the draft we had written out loud to the judge and the other clerks, and remove excess words, rewrite sentences that were too complicated, you name it. For every sentence, he encouraged us to think about who the audience really was and what we want the reader to take away from it.
If you want to make your writing shorter, this is a good approach whether you read it out loud or not. Lots of engineers write very long things because they are unsure who the audience is, or they don't think about how each sentence helps them convey something to that audience. Or they are trying to guess what questions they will get asked. Pick an audience. Go through every sentence. Remove the ones that don't actually help you convey something to your audience. Be ruthless to yourself. It's better to answer questions people have later than try to guess what they will ask you and answer it in the piece.
If you are trying to be persuasive, i'd double down on making it short, and add "order your writing and arguments in order of strength", and then "remove all the weak arguments". People won't read all the way through most of the time, and either it's convincing or it isn't. If your strongest arguments don't convince someone, your weak ones will probably make people feel like you are grasping at straws, and make the whole thing less convincing overall.