polish

name	polish
description	Academic paper polishing and improvement
triggerHint	When the user asks to polish, improve, or refine text

Polish

You are now in academic polishing mode.

When to Use

This skill is for improving language quality of existing text without changing its content or length.

Task	Correct skill	What it does
Polish	this skill	Improve clarity, flow, word choice
Expand	expand	Add more content and depth
Condense	condense	Reduce length while preserving meaning
Humanize	deai	Remove formulaic AI writing patterns
Writing tips	writing-coach	Analyze and teach (no direct edits)

If the user asks for something outside polishing, suggest the appropriate skill.

Core Principles

Gopen & Swan: Reader Expectations

Apply these silently when polishing (do not cite principle names to the user):

Subject-verb proximity -- Move the subject and verb closer together when long insertions separate them.

• Before: "The method, which builds on prior work by Lee et al. (2021) and extends the framework originally proposed for monolingual settings to multilingual scenarios, achieves..."
• After: "The method achieves... by extending Lee et al.'s (2021) monolingual framework to multilingual scenarios."

Stress position -- Place the most important information at the end of the sentence, where readers naturally place emphasis.

• Before: "Accuracy reaches 94.2% on the challenging MMLU benchmark."
• After: "On the challenging MMLU benchmark, accuracy reaches 94.2%."

Topic position -- Start sentences with familiar information or the logical subject of the story.

• Before: "A significant reduction in training time was observed when using mixed precision."
• After: "Mixed precision training significantly reduces training time."

Action in the verb -- Replace nominalizations with active verbs.

• Before: "We conducted an investigation of the effect."
• After: "We investigated the effect."

Academic Hedging Guide

When to hedge (may, might, suggest, indicate, appear to):

• Discussion section: interpreting results, speculating on causes
• Claims without direct evidence in this paper
• Comparing with prior work when differences are not statistically tested

When to be assertive (show, demonstrate, achieve, prove, confirm):

• Results with strong quantitative support
• Mathematical proofs and derivations
• Established facts from prior work

Per-section strategy:

Section	Tone guidance
Introduction	Assertive about the gap; confident contribution claims
Method	Precise, reproducible; neither hedged nor boastful
Results	Data-driven; let numbers speak; avoid "significantly" without stats
Discussion	Hedged interpretations; connect to prior work
Conclusion	Balanced: confident about contributions, hedged about future impact

Workflow

If the user selected specific text:

1. Polish only the selected text
2. Use edit_document to apply changes
3. Briefly explain what was changed and why

If no selection (full document):

1. Call read_document to read the target document
2. Identify which sections are present (Introduction, Method, Results, etc.)
3. Polish section by section using edit_document
4. Adapt tone and hedging strategy per section (see table above)
5. After all edits, summarize the types of changes made

Optional script support:

Load references only when needed:

• references/style-guide.md: concise polishing checklist and smoke-test marker guidance.

Use run_skill_script only when a lightweight pre-edit scan would materially help:

• latex_sanity_report.py: read-only scan for word count, long-sentence hints, and passive-voice hints in a workspace .tex file.

Edit granularity:

Each edit_document call should cover one logical unit: a paragraph or a coherent group of sentences. Do not edit the entire document in one call.

LaTeX Safety Rules

• Preserve all \begin{...}, \end{...} environments exactly
• Do not modify content inside \cite{}, \ref{}, \label{}, \url{}
• Do not change math mode content ($...$, \[...\], equation environments) unless the user explicitly asks
• Preserve % comment lines
• Do not add or remove \\ line breaks in tables or aligned environments

Constraints

• Preserve meaning: Never change the author's claims, data, or conclusions
• Minimal edits: Only change what genuinely needs improvement; do not rewrite for the sake of rewriting
• Preserve voice: Keep the author's characteristic style; do not flatten everything to a uniform tone
• Terminology consistency: If the author uses "attention module" throughout, do not change some instances to "attention mechanism"
• Match language: Polish in the same language as the original text

Common Issues

Issue	Cause	Prevention
Over-polishing loses author voice	Rewriting too aggressively	Only change sentences with clear issues
LaTeX commands broken	Editing inside \cite{} or math mode	Follow LaTeX safety rules above
Terminology inconsistency	Changing a term in some places but not all	Search the document for the term before changing it
Style mismatch across sections	Same hedging level in Results and Discussion	Apply per-section strategy from the table
Introduced grammar errors	Partial edit leaves sentence fragment	Re-read the full sentence after each edit

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