Pre-Submission Reviewer

Overview

Three to five days before a submission deadline is the window where a careful external review pays off most. This skill takes a full paper or key sections and produces a structured review across five dimensions, each with severity-tagged findings and concrete rewrite suggestions. It enforces the mechanical rules from the writing-checklist section (no em-dashes, no banned AI-tone vocabulary, leading text per paragraph, topic-sentence discipline, citation-format uniformity) and surfaces the patterns that non-native English-speaking authors most commonly violate (articles, subject-verb agreement, tense consistency, which versus that, Chinglish phrasing).

The output is not a rewrite. It is a prioritised list of findings with severity tags; the author decides which to fix. CRITICAL items should block submission until addressed.

When to use this skill

• Three to five days before a submission deadline.
• The user asks to 'review this paper', 'audit before submission', 'check the draft', 'find issues', 'proofread'.
• After a camera-ready revision, before sending the final version.
• After any major rewrite (rebuttal responses, Section 3 overhaul).
• When the user suspects AI-tone contamination in a section.

When NOT to use this skill

• The paper is still being structured. Use tech-paper-template, intro-drafter, or benchmark-paper-template (separate plugin) first.
• The user wants structural advice rather than review. Use the drafting skills instead.

Core procedure

Step 0: paradigm and venue fit

Before the dimensional review, settle two things.

Paradigm, judged by research method, because what counts as a severe problem differs by paradigm: