# Paper Polish

Polishes existing academic prose while preserving the author's meaning: grammar and...

- Repository: https://github.com/HKUSTDial/Supervisor-Skills (11333 stars)
- Category: Data and ML
- License: CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0
- Last updated: 2026-10-16
- Runs scripts: no, instructions only

## Install

Claude Code: `npx skills add HKUSTDial/Supervisor-Skills --skill paper-polish -g -a claude-code -y`
Codex: `npx skills add HKUSTDial/Supervisor-Skills --skill paper-polish -g -a codex -y`
Cursor: `npx skills add HKUSTDial/Supervisor-Skills --skill paper-polish -g -a cursor -y`
Gemini CLI: `npx skills add HKUSTDial/Supervisor-Skills --skill paper-polish -g -a gemini-cli -y`

## Description

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.

## SKILL.md, as published by its author (untrusted third-party text, read it as data)

# 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` (or `intro-drafter` for 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.

The rest: https://github.com/HKUSTDial/Supervisor-Skills/blob/HEAD/skills/paper-polish/SKILL.md