The purpose of this paper is to investigate the process of coordination reduction in various languages and to propose a universal set of rules that will account for all types of coordination reduction. In a brief discussion of some of the more recent proposals on coordination reduction it will be shown that these proposals fail to account for the data in a principled way, mostly because they assume the directionality constraint. It will be argued that coordination reduction consist of a deletion rule that only operates forward, and of a regrouping rule that functions to restore the scope relations within the reduced sentence. Finally, it will be suggested that many of the constraints on deletion and regrouping can be accounted for if we assume the principle of scope. (Author)