academic-writing-refiner
Academic Writing Refiner
This skill transforms rough or intermediate academic drafts into polished, publication-ready prose for top-tier CS conferences. The goal is writing that is clear, precise, and accessible to a broad technical audience — the kind of writing that reviewers at venues like NeurIPS, ICML, or ACL appreciate because it respects their time and communicates ideas efficiently.
Core Philosophy
Top CS conferences share a common expectation: writing should be a transparent window into the ideas, not a display of vocabulary. The best papers at NeurIPS, ACL, or KDD succeed not because they use impressive words, but because every sentence earns its place and every paragraph advances the reader's understanding.
This means:
- Clarity over cleverness: Use the simplest word that precisely conveys the meaning. "Use" instead of "utilize", "show" instead of "demonstrate" (unless you mean a formal proof/demonstration), "many" instead of "a plethora of".
- Precision over vagueness: Replace hedging language with specific claims. Instead of "our method performs quite well", say "our method achieves 94.3% accuracy, outperforming the strongest baseline by 2.1 points".
- Economy over verbosity: Every sentence should do work. If removing a sentence doesn't lose information, remove it.
- Flow over fragmentation: Guide the reader from one idea to the next with logical connectives, not abrupt jumps.
How to Refine
When a user provides text to refine, follow this process: