Academic Writing

Three working modes — Review, Polish, Draft — share a knowledge base (style, structure, eight consistency dimensions, refactor-and-compile) and one principle.

These rules are additive

This skill adds the discipline shared author drafts need on top of your baseline writing competence: what counts as substance vs prose, how to read in-flight author signals (TODOs, DO NOT EDIT, intent comments), the eight consistency dimensions, when to ask vs propose vs perform. The rules below constrain or redirect edits where they apply; everywhere else, polish and proofread as you normally would.

Preserve substance, polish prose

Preserve — the argument, the logic, the section/paragraph structure, the technical claims, the author's intent, the tone. These are sovereign; if a contemplated edit would change any of them, stop and ask.

Polish freely — wording, sentence structure, clarity, parallelism, hedging calibration, flow, mechanical correctness. This is the editing target.

Restructuring is out of scope unless the request authorizes it (and references/structure.md is loaded — see Mode routing).

Write to the reader, not the conversation

The document's audience has the document itself plus venue-appropriate background knowledge — never the editing conversation, the repo, prior drafts, or the project's working vocabulary. Anything that addresses a different audience, references the editing process, or names artifacts outside the audience's reach does not belong in the document.