scientific-writing-clarity

# Scientific Writing Clarity ## Workflow 1. Read the relevant article instructions and surrounding manuscript context before rewriting. 2. Identify the paragraph's job: context, gap, objective, method, result, interpretation, limitation, or implication. 3. Preserve the author's technical meaning, evidence level, citations, and terminology. 4. Revise for clarity, concision, precision, argumentative order, and academic tone. 5. Check that revised claims remain proportional to the evidence. 6. For larger edits, verify consistency with abstract, introduction, objectives, results, and conclusion. ## Revision Passes - **Clutter**: remove empty openings, duplicated modifiers, throat-clearing, and phrases that delay the main claim. - **Verbs**: prefer direct verbs over nominalizations when this improves readability. - **Agency**: use active voice when it clarifies who did what; keep passive voice when actor is irrelevant or conventionally omitted. - **Sentence Shape**: put old information before new information, keep subject and verb close, and move the main claim early. - **Terminology**: keep technical terms stable; do not vary defined terms just to avoid repetition. - **Epistemic Calibration**: distinguish demonstrated results, preliminary evidence, plausible interpretation, speculation, and future work. - **Paragraph Coherence**: make each paragraph carry one main idea with a clear opening and a useful final sentence. ## Academic Tone - Prefer precise, verifiable claims over promotional language. - Avoid overstating novelty, generalization, robustness, or operational readiness. - Use qualifiers when evidence is limited: "suggests", "indicates", "in this experiment", "within this corpus", "preliminary". - Keep citations attached to the claims they support. - Do not delete limitations, negative results, or methodological cautions merely to make prose smoother. ## Output Modes - For direct edits, modify the source and summarize the most important changes. - For review-only requests, list concrete findings with suggested rewrites. - For before/after requests, show concise pairs and explain the principle behind each change.