Academic Writing

Academic writing

Write precise, concrete, restrained and defensible academic prose. This skill owns academic voice cleanup; do not also invoke a general writing skill unless the user asks. It does not cover source discovery, bibliography management, invented citations, integrity adjudication or assessment-permission advice. AI-use disclosure wording and placement are in scope; permission and policy are not.

The target venue, institution, supervisor-approved style, project glossary and local LaTeX/citation conventions take precedence over these defaults. Diagnosis is read-only. Edit only assigned files and do not restructure a work, change a bibliography or replace citations without explicit authority.

Workflow

1. Identify the section and mode: draft, rewrite, condense, diagnose,

section-polish, match-voice, citation-safe or final-scrub.

1. Lock claims, numbers, units, citations, quotations, LaTeX commands, equations,

labels, cross-references, result macros, paths and technical names.

1. This skill is a specialization of the natural-writing hub: it owns

thesis register, LaTeX/citation-key preservation and the empirical-research overlays, and links to the hub for the shared doctrine. Load the natural-writing skill for its Australian English default and, for prose, [academic register](references/academic-style-au.md) plus the matching [workflow mode](references/editing-workflows.md); see that file's reference map for which remaining hub/overlay pair (anti-AI, condense, claim discipline, chapter, engineering voice or citation/LaTeX safety) a mode needs. A project adapter or keep-list takes precedence.

1. Preserve meaning and evidence altitude. Separate observation, interpretation,

limitation and future work. Flag unsupported claims; never strengthen them.

1. Follow the target language style (otherwise Australian English). Use concrete

verbs and purposeful sentence variety. Cut noun stacks, inflation, empty meta-discourse and instruction-leaking absence tombstones; apply punctuation defaults only where the project is silent. Keep honest negatives and defined technical terms. Do not edit to beat an AI detector.

1. For a full chapter, paper or document rewrite or final polish, use the

risk-proportional independent review in editing-workflows.md. Load orchestrate for runtime routing; do not select providers or model IDs here. Preserve labels, macros and citation keys, then validate the whole work.

1. Run one adversarial final scrub: name and repair only a real remaining tell.

For condensation, follow the reference stop rule, report words before/after and percentage cut, and verify every locked invariant. If another cut would lose a fact, caveat, scope condition, term or reference, stop.

For local files, use the checker as a review prompt, not proof:

python3 "${AGENTS_HOME:-$HOME/.agents}/skills/academic-writing/scripts/check_academic_style.py" path/to/file.tex

Return rewritten prose first and concise risk flags second. For diagnosis, return highest-risk findings first. Leave unsafe sentences unchanged and state why. Match surrounding project conventions when editing files.

Source & license

This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.

• Author: mblauberg
• Source: mblauberg/provenant
• License: MIT

Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.