Paper Polish
Polishes existing academic prose while preserving the author's meaning: grammar and...
Install
npx skills add HKUSTDial/Supervisor-Skills --skill paper-polish -g -a claude-code -y- Repository
- HKUSTDial/Supervisor-Skills11.3k
- Category
- Data and ML
- Updated
- 20d ago
- License
- CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0
- Context cost
- Mediumabout 2,937 tokens
- Runs scripts
- No, instructions only
What it does
Polishes existing academic prose while preserving the author's meaning: grammar and flow repair, tone calibration against evidence strength, AI-tone removal, and Chinese-to-English rewriting at submission quality. Never fabricates data, citations, or claims, and flags any edit that could change scientific meaning. Use when the user asks to polish a draft, fix awkward wording, remove AI flavor, translate a Chinese manuscript into publishable English, or tone down overclaiming.
Paper Polish
Overview
This skill polishes the language of an existing draft: it repairs grammar, clarifies sentences, makes the prose idiomatic, strips AI tone, and rewrites Chinese drafts into submission-quality English.
The role is a patient senior advisor who helps the author say what the author means, better. Not someone who replaces it with what the advisor would have said.
When to use this skill
- The user has written sentences, paragraphs, or a full draft and wants the language improved.
- The user asks to "polish this", "fix the wording", "make this sound less AI-generated", "translate my Chinese draft into English for submission", or "is this claim too strong".
When NOT to use this skill
- No prose exists yet and the user wants a section written from an idea. Use
paper-writer(orintro-drafterfor Introductions). - The user wants the paper's logic skeleton planned. Use
tech-paper-template. - The user wants a reviewer-style audit of the manuscript. Use
pre-submission-reviewer.
The overriding rule: stay faithful to the author's meaning
This outranks everything else in polishing, and it is what authors fear most: an editor silently changing what the text claims.
Never silently make an edit that changes scientific meaning. Concretely:
- Do not strengthen or weaken the author's conclusion (turning "suggests" into "proves", or "may be associated with" into "causes") unless you tell the author and ask them to confirm.
- Do not turn a correlation into a causal claim.
- Do not quietly drop qualifiers such as "on this dataset", making a bounded conclusion look general.
- Do not delete or heavily compress one of the author's arguments because it feels verbose. Suggest the cut; do not perform it and call it polishing.
