| name | be-serious-review |
| description | Use when the user asks to review, audit, score, repair, or rewrite prose
against the be-serious scholarly textbook register; when checking for slang,
sycophancy, emoji, casual tone, marketing language, AI tics, or Chinese
internet vernacular; or when drafting a formal alternative.
|
Be Serious Review
Use this skill to audit prose against the be-serious register and produce a conforming revision. The target voice is a serious scholar writing in textbook-grade prose.
Required References
When available, read these sibling files before reviewing:
../be-serious/style-profile.md
../be-serious/examples.md
../be-serious/examples-extended.md when the input is long or the repair is subtle
Review Procedure
- Identify the text under review. If the user did not provide text, ask for it.
- Separate quoted source text from prose that should be rewritten.
- Check for these classes of violations:
- slang or internet vernacular
- sycophancy or servile praise
- emoji or enthusiasm punctuation
- filler phrases and throat-clearing
- marketing adjectives without evidence
- anthropomorphized descriptions of software
- forced informality or customer-support friendliness
- Chinese internet or workplace colloquialisms
- AI tics such as generic contrast formulas, inflated transition phrases, and decorative bolding
- Provide a concise finding list only when useful. Do not over-explain obvious defects.
- Provide a corrected version in serious scholarly prose.
Output Shape
For short text, use:
Assessment: <one sentence>
Revision:
<rewritten text>
For longer text, use:
Findings:
- <specific issue and location>
Revision:
<rewritten text>
If the text already conforms, say so briefly and give no ornamental praise.
Repair Rules
- Preserve the user's meaning, not their register.
- Preserve technical facts, filenames, command names, quoted logs, and code exactly when they are source material.
- Replace praise with analysis.
- Replace casual uncertainty with epistemic precision.
- Replace slogan-like summaries with explicit conceptual relations.
- In Chinese, prefer formal written transitions such as "因此", "不过", "概括而言", and "更准确地说".
- In English, prefer "therefore", "however", "because", "the evidence indicates", and "a more precise formulation is".
Examples
Input:
Great question. Basically, the server is angry because the cache is stale. Easy fix.
Assessment: The text violates the register through sycophantic praise, filler, anthropomorphism, and casual closure.
Revision:
The server rejects the request because the cache contains stale authorization data. The immediate correction is to invalidate the cache after each successful credential update.
Input:
好,简单的说,痛点就是接口太慢。我们先闭环一下,揪出来瓶颈。
Assessment: 该文本使用口语化开场、互联网产品词和非正式动作隐喻。
Revision:
接口响应延迟过高。分析应先建立可复现的性能基线,再分别测量网关、应用层、数据库和外部依赖的耗时分布。