That is a really tough question. I'll speculate but it isn't much more than that. The difficulty is that Rand tends to make the same point several different ways, each of which is pretty good. From the point of view of the author, for whom each of the different ways might be the only one that turns a light bulb on for the reader, there is a resistance to cutting any of them. For the editor, who has to sell the thing in a package that book stores will buy, it simply has to be smaller. In fact, AS almost didn't get published for that very reason - the editor who finally bought it had to threaten to quit in order to convince his superiors to go through with it. And for the reader contemplating an 1100-page brick it's pretty intimidating.
What I'd cut at this point might be some of the unneccessarily (IMHO) repetitive descriptions of Hank and Lillian's married life and perhaps the irritatingly theoretical explanations for why Dagny and Hank wind up sharing a bed. And some of the speeches seem artificially long - did Francisco really need upwards of five pages to make his Root Of Money point? And does anyone really think that a crowd at a wedding party would listen to it?
The real problem, I think, is that Rand was trying to balance a flow of logic with a flow of narrative and the two aren't always compatible. What the heck, I might change my mind a few chapters hence...
Especially if the class bully hits you over the head with it.
Bill, you have brought so much valuable insight to this discussion that I look forward most of all each week to your essays. And while I can certainly understand objectively (thanks, Ayn;-)) the criticisms of so many of her writing style, for myself, I wouldn't cut a word. Not even the somehow tawdry sex scenes.
You see, I look on this book as a novel first, which surely conveys hugely important moral, economic and political ideas, but is first and foremost an entertainment. Otherwise it would consist of carefully terse statements of each of her points, with lots of boring footnotes to back her up. But it's a novel, meant to be enjoyed for the reading of it, and as such I can't get enough. Perhaps that is why I've read it so many times, even though I know what she has to say, know how it turns out. The very fact that she finds so many different ways to say what she says, that sometimes she says things which seem at first to be contradictory (Francisco as a character, for instance), provides me with a huge measurement of plain entertainment. I find myself sub-vocalizing Francisco's Money speech each time I read it, as if rehearsing it to present to other people as an explanation for what they don't understand. So if others would like it cut, or edited, I say fine, but leave me my copy of the original!
Kirk