Academic Writer

AI-assisted academic manuscript polishing toolkit for Claude Code — combines Glasman-Deal writing guidelines with your reference materials to refine scientific text for publication.

Structure

Academic writer/
├── .claude/skills/academic-polish/   # The skill
│   └── SKILL.md
├── Example/                          # Template project (copy this to start a new paper)
└── .gitignore

What It Does

• Polish academic text section by section (Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion, Conclusion, Abstract)
• Apply field-specific language patterns extracted from your reference articles
• Ensure journal compliance by checking against author instructions and published examples
• Critical review — flags structural issues, argumentation gaps, and format violations

How It Works

Three-layer polishing framework:

Output is a three-section template: polished text → changes made with rationale → critical review.

Installation

This is a project-level Claude Code skill. It activates automatically when you work in a paper project directory that follows the convention below.

Project Convention

Each paper project follows this layout:

My-Paper/
├── CLAUDE.md              # Manuscript metadata (title, journal, key findings)
├── Manuscript/             # Working manuscript
├── Author Instructions/    # Target journal guidelines
├── Guidelines/             # Glasman-Deal writing units (8 Units)
└── Sample/
    ├── Research Topic/     # Subfield reference articles
    ├── Methodology/        # Methodology reference articles
    └── Journal Examples/   # Published examples from target journal

Copy Example/ to bootstrap a new paper project.

Usage

Paste mode — quick polish of a paragraph:

/academic-polish Polish this Introduction paragraph.

Physical activity has been widely recognized as an important factor...

Whole-section mode — polish an entire section from Manuscript/:

/academic-polish Polish the entire Methods section.

Review-only mode — structural feedback without language polish:

/academic-polish Just review my Discussion. Target journal is EJPC.

Reference Materials

For each project, provide 4 types of reference materials in Sample/:

1. Research Topic — papers in your subfield (guides terminology, Introduction logic, Discussion literature dialogue)
2. Methodology — papers using similar methods (guides Methods sentence patterns, statistical reporting)
3. Journal Examples — papers published in your target journal (guides structure, tone, subheading conventions)
4. Author Instructions — the journal’s submission guidelines (format constraints, word limits, required elements)

Guidelines

This skill relies on the 8-unit guidelines from “Science Research Writing for Native and Non-Native Speakers of English” (Glasman-Deal, 2nd Edition, 2020).

Each paper project should contain its own Guidelines/Units/ directory with the extracted units.