Agent skill

Academic Writing Refiner

by wentorai in wentorai/research-plugins

Checklist-driven academic English polishing and Chinglish correction

MITAuto-check passedResearch & Science

Install Academic Writing Refiner

skills CLI
$ npx skills add wentorai/research-plugins --skill academic-writing-refiner -a claude-code

Project install by default; add -g for ~/.claude/skills/.

GitHub CLI
$ gh skill install wentorai/research-plugins academic-writing-refiner --agent claude-code

Project scope by default; add --scope user for a personal install. Needs GitHub CLI 2.90.0 or later (public preview).

Manual copy
$ git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/wentorai/research-plugins.git skills-src && mkdir -p .claude/skills && cp -r skills-src/skills/writing/polish/academic-writing-refiner .claude/skills/academic-writing-refiner && rm -rf skills-src

Use ~/.claude/skills/ instead of .claude/skills for a personal install. The folder must contain SKILL.md.

Claude Code skills documentation · loads skills from .claude/skills/

Facts

Skill name
academic-writing-refiner
GitHub stars
298
Used in
1 other repo
Token cost
~1.7k tokens
SKILL.md length
785 words
Files
1
Skills in repo
405
Repo updated
First seen
Licence
MIT

At a glance

Checklist-driven academic English polishing and Chinglish correction

  • Works in 5 steps: Topic-comment structure. Chinese allows… → Redundant verbs. Chinese often uses… → Missing determiners. Chinese has no… → …
  • Tasks that involve Scientific writing
  • SKILL.md covers Overview, Common Error Categories, Self-Editing Checklist and Automated Polishing Tools, plus 3 more sections
  • Calls java and npm

What it does

Academic Writing Refiner is an agent skill from wentorai/research-plugins. Checklist-driven academic English polishing and Chinglish correction

Its SKILL.md is about 1.7k tokens, which your agent loads only when the skill is triggered. It is a single SKILL.md file with no bundled scripts.

It sits in Research & Science, covering Scientific writing. The repository describes itself as: 350+ academic research skills, MCP configs, and plugins for Research-Claw and AI agents. The licence is MIT.

When your agent uses it

  • Tasks that involve Scientific writing

Example prompts

  • “/academic-writing-refiner”

Requirements

  • Node.js

Workflow steps

5 steps, taken from the first numbered list in SKILL.md.

  1. Topic-comment structure. Chinese allows "As for X, Y does Z." English prefers "Y does Z to X."
  2. Redundant verbs. Chinese often uses verb-verb compounds that become redundant in English.
  3. Missing determiners. Chinese has no articles, leading to dropped "the/a/an."
  4. Overuse of "respectively."
  5. "With the development of..." This opening is overused to the point of cliche.

What it can do on your machine

Read from SKILL.md and the folder at commit bf44b3c. It shows what the files ask for, not the result of running them.

  • Tool permissions

    Pre-approves nothing: there is no allowed-tools line, so your agent's usual permission prompts apply.

    From allowed-tools in the SKILL.md frontmatter.

  • Runs code

    Shell commands in SKILL.md call:

    • java
    • npm

    From the folder's file list and the shell code blocks in SKILL.md.

  • Network

    Links to these hosts (documentation or services it may open):

    • github.com
    • cs.columbia.edu
    • writefull.com
    • languagetool.org

    From URLs in SKILL.md, links to its own repository left out.

  • Credentials

    Names no API keys, tokens, secrets or passwords.

    From names ending in _API_KEY, _TOKEN, _SECRET, _KEY or _PASSWORD in SKILL.md.

Context cost

Academic Writing Refiner loads about 1.7k tokens when it runs. Until then it costs about 23 tokens; SKILL.md has 785 words of instructions outside code blocks.

Always · name and description, kept in context so the agent knows when to use it
~23
When it runs · the whole SKILL.md, loaded when a task matches
~1.7k

Estimates: characters ÷ 4, the usual rule of thumb; real counts depend on the model's tokenizer. Scripts and assets cost tokens only if the agent reads them.

Safety

Auto-check passed

The automated check found no risky patterns in SKILL.md.

Automated static check — not a guarantee. Review scripts before installing. It scans the text of SKILL.md for risky patterns (piping downloads into a shell, reading credential files, hidden Unicode, destructive commands); files beside SKILL.md are not scanned.

SKILL.md

The full file from wentorai/research-plugins at commit bf44b3c, republished under its MIT licence (© wentorai). 785 words, ~1,741 tokens.

Download SKILL.mdSave it as .claude/skills/academic-writing-refiner/SKILL.md (or your agent's skills folder).
name
academic-writing-refiner
description
Checklist-driven academic English polishing and Chinglish correction

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 TypeExample (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.
Show full SKILL.md (310 more words)Show less
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:

bash
# 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
ToolTypeAcademic FocusFree Tier
GrammarlyCloudGeneral + academicYes (limited)
WritefullPluginHigh (trained on papers)Yes
LanguageToolLocal/CloudGeneralYes (full)
textlintCLIConfigurable rulesYes (open source)
TrinkaCloudHigh (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

© wentorai, MIT. Rendered from Markdown: HTML in the file is shown as text, images as links, and headings moved down two levels. Raw file

Files

Just SKILL.md in skills/writing/polish/academic-writing-refiner of wentorai/research-plugins.

Open the folder on GitHubat commit bf44b3c

Used in 1 other repository

We found 1 copy of this SKILL.md (exact, near-identical or edited) in other folders, from 1 other GitHub owner. This page covers the copy in wentorai/research-plugins, which our catalogue first saw on October 7, 2026.

Compare with similar skills

Academic Writing Refiner next to the 5 skills that share the most tags, products or categories with it. Stars are the repository's; “used in” counts other GitHub owners with a copy.

Academic Writing Refiner compared with similar skills
SkillStarsUsed inTokensAuto-checkLicenceRepo updated
Academic Writing Refiner this skillwentorai/research-plugins2981 repos~1.7kAutomated safety check: PassMIT
Nature-Style Scientific FiguresYuan1z0825/nature-skills47k—~3.1kAutomated safety check: PassApache-2.0
Citation Verification GuideGalaxy-Dawn/claude-scholar5.7k2 repos~1.9kAutomated safety check: PassMIT
Citation ManagementK-Dense-AI/claude-scientific-writer2.4k2 repos~3.9kAutomated safety check: NotesMIT
Academic Paper Composerlishix520/academic-paper-skills1.4k2 repos~6.3kAutomated safety check: PassMIT
Academic Paper Writing PipelineImbad0202/academic-research-skills51k—~16kAutomated safety check: PassCustom licence

Similar skills

  • Nature-Style Scientific Figures

    Yuan1z0825/nature-skills

    Creates, revises, audits and exports manuscript-ready scientific figures in Python or R, and routes AI-generated graphical abstracts to a separate workflow.

    47k GitHub stars~3.1k tokensUpdated today
    Research & ScienceAuto-check passed
  • Citation Verification Guide

    Galaxy-Dawn/claude-scholar

    Reference guidance for checking every citation in academic writing against canonical sources such as DOI, arXiv, CrossRef and Semantic Scholar, to catch fake or wrong references.

    5.7k GitHub starsUsed in 2 repos~1.9k tokens
    Research & ScienceAuto-check passed
  • Citation Management

    K-Dense-AI/claude-scientific-writer

    Finds papers in OpenAlex, PubMed and Google Scholar, turns DOIs, PMIDs and arXiv IDs into clean BibTeX, and validates citations for a manuscript or thesis.

    2.4k GitHub starsUsed in 2 repos~3.9k tokens
    Research & ScienceAuto-check: notes
  • Academic Paper Composer

    lishix520/academic-paper-skills

    Systematic writing framework for philosophy and interdisciplinary academic papers from optimized outline to submission-ready manuscript.

    1.4k GitHub starsUsed in 2 repos~6.3k tokens
    Research & ScienceAuto-check passed
  • Academic Paper Writing Pipeline

    Imbad0202/academic-research-skills

    Runs a 12-agent pipeline that plans, drafts, cites, reviews and formats academic papers, with modes for revision, rebuttals, abstracts and citation checks.

    51k GitHub stars~16k tokensUpdated yesterday
    Research & ScienceAuto-check passed
  • Scientific Venue Templates

    davila7/claude-code-templates

    Supplies LaTeX templates and formatting rules for journals, conferences, posters, and grant proposals, then can check a draft against them.

    33k GitHub starsUsed in 9 repos~5.1k tokens
    Research & ScienceAuto-check: notes

More from wentorai/research-plugins

All 405 skills in this repo
  • Abstract Writing Guide

    wentorai/research-plugins

    Craft structured research abstracts that maximize clarity and journal acceptance

    298 GitHub starsUsed in 1 repo~1.7k tokens
    Auto-check passed
  • Academic Citation Manager

    wentorai/research-plugins

    Manage academic citations across BibTeX, APA, MLA, and Chicago formats

    298 GitHub starsUsed in 1 repo~2.7k tokens
    Auto-check passed
  • Academic Paper Summarizer

    wentorai/research-plugins

    Summarize academic papers with structured extraction of key elements

    298 GitHub starsUsed in 1 repo~1.4k tokens
    Auto-check passed
  • Academic Study Methods

    wentorai/research-plugins

    Evidence-based study techniques for academic learning and retention

    298 GitHub starsUsed in 1 repo~1.8k tokens
    Auto-check passed
  • Academic Tone Guide

    wentorai/research-plugins

    Adjust writing tone and register for academic audiences and venues

    298 GitHub starsUsed in 1 repo~1.9k tokens
    Auto-check passed
  • Academic Translation Guide

    wentorai/research-plugins

    Academic translation, post-editing, and Chinglish correction guide

    298 GitHub starsUsed in 1 repo~1.6k tokens
    Auto-check passed

Questions about Academic Writing Refiner

What does Academic Writing Refiner do?

Checklist-driven academic English polishing and Chinglish correction. Academic Writing Refiner is an agent skill from wentorai/research-plugins.

When should I use Academic Writing Refiner?

Academic Writing Refiner fits situations like: tasks that involve Scientific writing.

How do I install Academic Writing Refiner in Claude Code?

Run `npx skills add wentorai/research-plugins --skill academic-writing-refiner -a claude-code`. Or copy the skill folder (skills/writing/polish/academic-writing-refiner in wentorai/research-plugins) into .claude/skills/academic-writing-refiner in your project. Claude Code loads it when a task matches its description.

How do I install Academic Writing Refiner in Codex?

Run `npx skills add wentorai/research-plugins --skill academic-writing-refiner -a codex`. Or copy the skill folder (skills/writing/polish/academic-writing-refiner in wentorai/research-plugins) into .agents/skills/academic-writing-refiner in your project. Codex loads it when a task matches its description.

Can I use Academic Writing Refiner in Cursor, Gemini CLI or GitHub Copilot?

Cursor, Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot and OpenCode also load SKILL.md folders. With the skills CLI, run `npx skills add wentorai/research-plugins --skill academic-writing-refiner -a cursor` (or -a gemini-cli, github-copilot or opencode for the others). To copy it by hand, put the folder in .cursor/skills/academic-writing-refiner, .gemini/skills/academic-writing-refiner, .github/skills/academic-writing-refiner and .opencode/skills/academic-writing-refiner in your project.

What does Academic Writing Refiner need to run?

Going by SKILL.md and its folder, Academic Writing Refiner needs the command-line tools its instructions call (java and npm). Our summary lists: Node.js.

Does Academic Writing Refiner access the network?

SKILL.md names 4 domains. As links in the text: github.com, cs.columbia.edu, writefull.com and languagetool.org. This is read from the text; nothing was executed.

Is Academic Writing Refiner safe to install?

Our automated static check of SKILL.md found no risky patterns, such as piping downloads into a shell, reading credential files or hidden Unicode. It is not a guarantee. Review the folder before installing.

What licence does Academic Writing Refiner use?

Academic Writing Refiner is published under the MIT licence (the repository's licence). It allows redistribution, so the full SKILL.md is shown on this page.

How many tokens does Academic Writing Refiner use?

About 1.7k tokens (SKILL.md is roughly 7k characters). Agents keep only the skill's name and description in context until a task matches; then they load SKILL.md in full.

What are the alternatives to Academic Writing Refiner?

Skills that share tags, products or a category with Academic Writing Refiner: Nature-Style Scientific Figures (Yuan1z0825/nature-skills, 47k stars), Citation Verification Guide (Galaxy-Dawn/claude-scholar, 5.7k stars), Citation Management (K-Dense-AI/claude-scientific-writer, 2.4k stars) and Academic Paper Composer (lishix520/academic-paper-skills, 1.4k stars). The comparison table on this page puts their stars, adoption, token cost, safety result and licence side by side.

Who maintains Academic Writing Refiner?

wentorai (a GitHub user) maintains it in wentorai/research-plugins, which has 298 GitHub stars. The repository holds 405 skills in this directory. The repository was last updated on June 19, 2026.

Source: wentorai/research-plugins on GitHub. Facts on this page come from the repository at the commit we read; the author's words are quoted as theirs.