brycewang-stanford/academic-writing-refiner

Academic Writing Refiner

Overview

Academic papers are judged not only on their scientific merit but also on the quality of their English. Grammatical errors, awkward phrasing, and non-native patterns (commonly called "Chinglish" when originating from Chinese-English interference) can distract reviewers and undermine credibility.

This skill provides a systematic checklist for identifying and correcting common academic English issues. It draws from the academic-writing-guide repository (327+ stars) maintained by SYSUSELab, which catalogs frequent mistakes observed in student and researcher manuscripts across STEM disciplines.

The approach is checklist-driven: rather than relying solely on automated tools, researchers learn to recognize error patterns and self-edit effectively. This skill is especially useful for non-native English speakers preparing manuscripts for international journals and conferences.

Common Error Categories

Grammar and Syntax Errors

| Error Type | Example (Wrong) | Correction | |-----------|-----------------|------------| | Article misuse | "We propose a novel the method" | "We propose a novel method" | | Subject-verb disagreement | "The results shows that..." | "The results show that..." | | Tense inconsistency | "We train the model and evaluated it" | "We trained the model and evaluated it" | | Dangling modifier | "Using gradient descent, the loss decreased" | "Using gradient descent, we decreased the loss" | | Run-on sentence | "The model converges fast it achieves high accuracy" | "The model converges fast and achieves high accuracy" |

Chinglish Patterns

These are interference patterns common when translating from Chinese thought patterns into English:

1. Topic-comment structure. Chinese allows "As for X, Y does Z." English prefers "Y does Z to X."

   • Wrong: "As for the dataset, we use ImageNet."
   • Better: "We use ImageNet as our dataset."

2. Redundant verbs. Chinese often uses verb-verb compounds that become redundant in English.

   • Wrong: "We can be able to achieve..."
   • Better: "We can achieve..."

3. Missing determiners. Chinese has no articles, leading to dropped "the/a/an."

   • Wrong: "Model achieves state-of-art result."
   • Better: "The model achieves a state-of-the-art result."

4. Overuse of "respectively."

   • Wrong: "The accuracy and F1 are 95% and 0.93 respectively."
   • Better: "The accuracy is 95% and the F1 score is 0.93."

5. "With the development of..." This opening is overused to the point of cliche.

   • Better: Lead with the specific problem or finding.

Self-Editing Checklist

Apply this checklist before submitting any manuscript:

Pass 1: Structure and Flow

• [ ] Each paragraph has a clear topic sentence.
• [ ] Transitions connect paragraphs logically (however, therefore, in contrast).
• [ ] No paragraph exceeds 200 words.
• [ ] Figures and tables are referenced in order.

Pass 2: Grammar and Mechanics

• [ ] All verbs agree with their subjects.
• [ ] Tense is consistent within each section (past for Methods/Results, present for general truths).
• [ ] Every acronym is defined on first use.
• [ ] No comma splices or run-on sentences.
• [ ] Articles (a, an, the) are used correctly.

Pass 3: Style and Conciseness

• [ ] Remove "very," "really," "quite," "basically" unless essential.
• [ ] Replace "in order to" with "to."
• [ ] Replace "a large number of" with "many" or give the exact count.
• [ ] Convert passive voice to active where possible.
• [ ] Eliminate "it is well known that" and similar filler phrases.

Pass 4: Technical Accuracy

• [ ] All numbers have units.
• [ ] Table column headers are unambiguous.
• [ ] Equations are numbered and referenced.
• [ ] Statistical claims include confidence intervals or p-values.

Automated Polishing Tools

While manual review is irreplaceable, these tools serve as a useful second pass:

# LanguageTool CLI for grammar checking
java -jar languagetool-commandline.jar -l en-US paper.tex

# Writefull for academic-specific suggestions (VS Code extension)
# Install from VS Code marketplace: "Writefull for LaTeX"

# textlint for rule-based prose linting
npm install -g textlint textlint-rule-no-dead-link textlint-rule-write-good
textlint paper.md

Tool Comparison

| Tool | Type | Academic Focus | Free Tier | |------|------|---------------|-----------| | Grammarly | Cloud | General + academic | Yes (limited) | | Writefull | Plugin | High (trained on papers) | Yes | | LanguageTool | Local/Cloud | General | Yes (full) | | textlint | CLI | Configurable rules | Yes (open source) | | Trinka | Cloud | High (academic-specific) | Yes (limited) |

Sentence-Level Revision Examples

Before and After

Before: "In recent years, with the rapid development of deep learning, more and more researchers have paid attention to the problem of image classification, which is a very important task in computer vision."

After: "Image classification is a fundamental task in computer vision. Recent advances in deep learning have renewed interest in this problem, with convolutional and transformer architectures achieving human-level accuracy on standard benchmarks."

Before: "We can observe from Table 1 that our method can achieve better performance than baseline methods in terms of all evaluation metrics."

After: "Our method outperforms all baselines across every metric (Table 1)."

Best Practices

• Read published papers in your target venue. Absorb the register and conventions of journals like Nature, IEEE TPAMI, or ACL.
• Have a native speaker review critical sections. At minimum, ask someone to read the Abstract and Introduction.
• Use consistent terminology. If you call it "feature extraction" in Section 2, do not switch to "representation learning" in Section 4 unless you define the distinction.
• Limit sentences to 25 words on average. Long sentences are harder to parse, especially for non-native readers.
• Revise in separate passes. Do not try to fix grammar, structure, and style simultaneously.

References

• academic-writing-guide -- Writing checklist and tutorials (327+ stars)
• Common Errors in Technical Writing -- Henning Schulzrinne, Columbia University
• Writefull -- AI writing assistant trained on published papers
• LanguageTool -- Open-source grammar checker