Academic Writing

Academic Writing

Three modes — Review, Polish, Draft — over one knowledge base: style, structure, eight consistency dimensions, refactor-and-compile.

These rules are additive

The rules below constrain or redirect edits where they apply — substance vs prose, in-flight author signals (TODOs, DO NOT EDIT, intent comments), the eight consistency dimensions, ask vs propose vs perform. Everywhere else, polish and proofread as you normally would.

Preserve substance, polish prose

• Preserve — argument, logic, section/paragraph structure, technical claims, author's intent, tone. Sovereign: an edit that would change any of them stops and asks.
• Polish freely — wording, sentence structure, clarity, parallelism, hedging calibration, flow, mechanical correctness. This is the editing target.
• Restructuring — out of scope unless the request authorizes it and references/structure.md is loaded.

Write to the reader, not the conversation

The document's audience has the document plus venue-appropriate background knowledge — never the editing conversation, the repo, prior drafts, or the project's working vocabulary. Content addressing a different audience, referencing the editing process, or naming artifacts outside their reach does not belong in the document.

Build the audience model before the first character changes. Answer both explicitly:

1. Who is the audience? The venue fixes tolerated jargon, formality, cite density, and detail: a top-five finance journal reader, an SSRN working-paper reader, a conference audience, a replication-package user, an editor reading a response letter.
2. What is in their information set? The current draft, works it cites, venue background knowledge.

Then check each sentence against the set: every term is in the set or defined at first use; every reference resolves from the set; every temporal cue is internal to the document's narrative ("we next turn to robustness"), not external to the editing process ("the table now defines"). references/style.md §Audience: write to the reader, not the conversation carries the line-level markers as the safety net; the audience model is the primary discipline.

Project Conventions in the task tree / CLAUDE.md

Writing-side conventions are paper-specific choices among defensible alternatives a fresh agent would otherwise silently re-decide each session.

Where they live (ladder, ordered by permanence). ## Project Conventions on the ## Objective of the manuscript-governing ancestor task — the task whose subtree is the manuscript, so every writing agent inherits it via the ancestor chain — then CLAUDE.md (project-permanent). No task tree: return the inventory as a conversation reply. Promote up the ladder when the user signals durability.

What writing contributes (rows alongside data and modeling contributions):

Excluded: math notation (symbol → meaning, equation numbering) — owned by theory-modeling's Notation Conventions table, a sibling subsection inside ## Project Conventions; section/caption capitalization and page-layout macros — venue / template territory.

Soft trigger. First long-form review or first draft pass against a paper with no recorded writing-side conventions: inventory them onto the manuscript-governing task or CLAUDE.md before substantive editing. Routine polish and single-lane review do not auto-scan.

Scanning is unspecified. Inventory using the detection language in references/consistency/*.md and references/style.md.

Before you start

1. Classify the request into a mode before reading the file — the mode determines what to load.
2. Inspect in-flight author work with git status / git diff before editing; an unstaged diff often is the polish target.
3. Inline directives are work assigned to you. TODO, % TODO:, \todo{...}, [fill in], ??, XXX, and crude or placeholder phrasing get cleaned up inside scope. An explicit DO NOT EDIT (or equivalent) marks a line or block off-limits even within scope.
4. Intent comments (% intent: … / <!-- intent: … --> above a paragraph) are author-owned: Polish preserves but never invents them. Full convention in polish.md §Intent comments and draft.md §Intent comments.

Mode routing

Loading the listed reference is the authority grant — without structure.md loaded, structural edits are out of scope by construction.

Knowledge files

Coupling to superRA workflows

Most writing work is standalone — terminate at edit + commit, or findings + commit. Larger work (whole-section drafts, whole-paper revisions, R&R passes) routes through superplan with references/planning.md. Multi-lane, deep, full-paper, or pre-submission review creates a review-only task subtree: reviewers inspect the existing draft through superimplement, findings live in task-local ## Review Notes (references/long-form-review.md).