academic-writing

The useful part is the insistence on methodology and structure before prose: a paper is judged on whether the method can be reproduced and whether the claims are scoped to the evidence, and a skill that front-loads those decisions saves a rewrite. Fitting the literature-review workflow alongside it means the related-work section gets built from an actual search rather than from memory, which is where hallucinated citations enter. Honest caveat: no writing skill can verify that a cited source says what the draft claims, so a verification pass over every reference is non-negotiable before submission, and the agent should be able to quote the sentence it is relying on. Style polish is the easy layer; be suspicious of improvements that only touch wording while leaving an unsupported claim in place.

Use case: Drafting a paper or literature review where methodology, structure and citation traceability have to survive peer review.

# Writing under the academic style contract This skill is a style contract more than a generator. Two rules carry most of the value: all output is markdown, and the substantive document lives inside a single tagged block so that surrounding conversational text stays clearly separate from the artifact. A reader or a downstream tool can then extract the paper without stripping commentary by hand. ## Citation discipline Only peer-reviewed and conference material is cited, and the skill explicitly forbids fabricated data, evidence or citations. It also matches the language of the query, which means a mixed-language draft is a defect: set the language once, at the top, rather than retrofitting it per section. ## A flow that produces monotonic arguments Ask for an outline, approve the structure, then request sections one at a time. Long single-shot requests tend to produce a beautifully formatted document whose middle sections quietly restate the introduction, because nothing forced the argument forward between sections. ```bash # pull just the delivered document out of a saved response python3 extract_doc.py response.md > paper.md ``` ## Tips - Request the reference list before the prose. If a source cannot be verified, drop the claim instead of softening the wording. - Keep your own reasoning outside the tagged block and the document inside it; mixing the two defeats the separation rule the skill exists to enforce. - Read the method section independently of the results. Methodology errors hide behind confident results prose. - gotcha: the skill refuses to invent references, so an empty bibliography usually means the question was asked at the wrong granularity, not that the topic is unstudied. - gotcha: language matching is applied from the query, so a switch mid-conversation leaves earlier sections in the old language while later ones change.