academic-prose

Academic Prose

Three rule sets, applied in this order whenever paper prose is written or edited:

1. Voice — plain-empirical register (§1).
2. No hype — strip constructions that put rhetoric ahead of substance (§2).
3. Evaluability — structure the paper so claims can be checked against evidence in seconds (§3).

Then run the pre-submission self-check (§4) before declaring any draft done. These rules apply to every paper, every venue, every section. If an instruction in the conversation conflicts with a rule here, flag the conflict rather than silently overriding.

Rationale (one line): the first judgement of a paper rests on whether the prose is clear and plain and whether the claims can be checked against the evidence quickly. These rules keep the writing from getting in the way of the work.

1. Voice — plain-empirical

Plain, confident, economical academic prose: one claim per sentence, subject–verb–object, moderate sentence length (15–30 words), no rhetorical staging. Formal machinery is always accompanied by a plain-language reading. Synthetic exemplars in voice-exemplars.md in this skill directory.

• Abstract: a flat sequence of "We X" declaratives — "We study… We propose… We prove that… We demonstrate… Our experiments show…" — closing with the contribution stated plainly: "The main contribution of this work is a tractable formal method for estimating topic models without relevance judgements."
• Person: "we" throughout, even when sole-authored.
• Problem-first openings: brief cited history of the area, then the gap in one sentence ("The primary obstacle to estimating such models is the absence of labelled examples at query time."), then the explicit motivation ("The desire to estimate this quantity directly is the primary motivation behind the present paper.").
• Signposting: "The remainder of this paper is structured as follows."; sections open "In this section we describe…"; back-references "As we pointed out in section 1.2".
• Definitions deflated and immediate: "A topic model is simply a probability distribution over the vocabulary." Introduce notation, then immediately gloss it: "We can think of this distribution as a summary of how the topic tends to be discussed."
• Connective stock: "Note that", "Recall that", "Suppose", "It is easy to see that", "It turns out that", "It is important to realise that", "It is worthwhile to point out that", "Intuitively, …", "In a nutshell, …".
• Intuition beside formalism: every formal step gets a prose reading; proofs and reductions are summarised in plain words before or after the symbols.
• Results register: "We observe that…" with plain numbers ("an improvement of 5%"); the significance procedure named in the text ("Significance was determined by a paired sign test at the 0.05 level."); restrained enthusiasm sparingly and always tied to evidence.
• Limitations stated mid-argument, not buried: "Note that this assumption may be problematic in practice, since the training sample is itself part of the collection."
• Measured corrections only when load-bearing: "At first glance it appears that adding weights makes the search harder, since we have introduced more degrees of freedom. In reality the weights make the problem tractable, since the relaxed space admits gradient methods." These remain subject to §2 — no staged reversals for drama.
• Related work engages each cited approach concretely in 2–4 sentences; parallel credit constructions are characteristic: "To the first line of work we owe the underlying model of relevance; to the second we credit the estimation machinery we build upon."
• Spelling: pick one variant (British or American) per the venue or the author's preference, and hold it with zero mixing.
• Punctuation: commas carry the sentences; em-dashes essentially absent; parentheses only for short glosses; footnotes rare.
• Conclusions: "In this paper we studied… We presented… We then showed…", closing with "questions that warrant further exploration".

Do not: pad sentences with qualifiers; chain subordinate clauses; use bold/italic for emphasis in running prose; adopt journalistic or marketing register; stack rhetorical questions.

2. No-hype rules (mandatory)

Banned constructions — rewrite on sight, in drafts and in any text being edited:

• Em-dash chains. At most one em-dash per paragraph, appositive definitions only. Never nest a clause inside an em-dash pair.
• Rhetorical inversion. "A strong annotator, we find, needs no training" → "We find that a strong annotator needs no training." Subject, verb, object.
• The pivot. "It is not X — it is Y", "not because X but because Y", "X is not the contribution; we use it to Z". State what is true; do not stage a reversal.
• Triadic drama. "It unifies. It predicts. It transfers." — three parallel short sentences or three bolded paragraph leads read as keynote rhetoric. Use an ordinary signposted enumeration.
• Aphoristic titles and slogan openers. No "The X Is the Y" titles; no abstract whose first sentence is a slogan. Titles name the method, the problem, and ideally the result, plainly.
• Intensifier adverbs. Crucially, importantly, notably, strikingly, remarkably, surprisingly — delete; the evidence carries the point.
• Stacked parenthetical hedges. One parenthetical caveat per sentence at most; move the rest to their own sentences or a footnote.

Prefer the venue's boring register over memorability. The goal is careful, plain academic prose. Read-aloud test: any sentence that sounds like a keynote slide, a tweet, or ad copy gets rewritten flat.

3. Evaluability rules (mandatory)

Write for a reviewer who reads the abstract, skims the intro for claims, jumps to the headline table, and tries to verify one claim end-to-end in five minutes. If any step needs a footnote, a split reconciliation, or decoding a flourish, the check fails. Honesty delivered inline reads as noise; honesty delivered in structure reads as rigour.

Claims. End the introduction with a numbered claims list (C1, C2, …), each pointing to the section and table that tests it. Every results subsection opens by naming its claim in one plain sentence with its supporting table. A claim with no dedicated table or figure is not a claim — give it one or demote it to discussion. State the contribution affirmatively, once; at most one "we do not claim X" delimitation in the whole paper, in the introduction, after the positive statement.

One protocol per headline number. Each benchmark in the headline table gets exactly one protocol — one split, one config, one selection procedure, the one the significance test uses. Variants live in ablation tables. No footnote may be needed to compare two cells of the same table; if one is, restructure the table. Non-comparable studies are firewalled in their own subsection with the difference stated in the table title. The significance-tested number is always the headline, never the "best" number.

Abstract. ≤160 words. Problem (one sentence), method in plain terms (one–two sentences), the claims as flat declaratives with at most one headline number each, one sentence on the conceptual contribution. Zero parentheticals, CIs, split sizes, or inline hedges — those live in the body. First sentence is a direct declarative ("We show that...", "This paper studies..."). Sentences over ~35 words get split.

Caveats consolidated, never interleaved. Qualifications, selection details, and protocol notes go in exactly two places: a short "Protocol" paragraph opening each experiments subsection, or the reproducibility appendix, with pointers. Results sentences state the result; the qualification lives one hop away. Preserve every disclosure — relocation, never deletion.

Register in results. One claim per sentence; maximum one parenthetical per paragraph. "Removing the corpus costs 11 F1 (Table 7)" beats "The corpus, not the parameters, is the model." Thesis-style section titles are acceptable, but the first sentence beneath each states the claim plainly with its table. Table captions ≤3 sentences, descriptive only. Teaser figures carry mechanism, not marketing — no "beats X" callouts.

Numbers are immutable and traceable. Every reported number traces to one protocol (ideally one registry entry or script). Never report two versions of "the" result for a benchmark in the main text. If a structural edit seems to require touching a number, stop and re-derive which protocol it belongs to — and ask before changing anything.

4. Pre-submission self-check (run before declaring any draft done)

1. Enumerate the claims and verify each against its evidence using only the claims box — each must be locatable and checkable in ≤30 seconds.
2. Each headline table: interpretable from its caption alone, single stated protocol, no footnote needed to compare its cells.
3. Read the abstract aloud; any sentence needing a breath mid-way gets split.
4. Count "we do not claim": more than one instance → delete down to one.
5. Search results sections for parentheses: each is deletable or evidence the sentence does two jobs.
6. Confirm the headline number is the significance-tested one and every variant is in an ablation table.
7. Grep the source for em-dashes ("---", and "--" outside number ranges); count and justify every remaining instance; check for banned constructions from §2.
8. Spot-check spelling is consistent with the chosen variant throughout — no mixing.

Report the outcome of this checklist to the user explicitly — pass/fail per item — before calling the draft finished.

One-line summary

Write plainly and economically (one claim per sentence, intuition beside formalism), strip every construction that puts rhetoric ahead of substance, state each claim once and plainly, test it under one protocol in one table readable from its caption, keep every qualification one structured hop away — and make the claim→evidence path walkable in thirty seconds.

Precedence over other skills

These voice, no-hype, and evaluability rules take precedence over any other writing, style, or paper-related skill. If another skill's instructions conflict, follow this skill and note the conflict. Mechanics skills (citation checking, math verification, LaTeX cleanup, venue templates, reviewer simulation) handle verification, formatting, and review structure only; whenever any of them would touch prose, tone, register, or abstract content, this skill governs.