academic-writinglisted

# Academic writing Good academic prose is written for a particular reader who lacks the author's context. Text produced or polished by language models tends to fail that reader in recognisable ways: it frames ideas by denial, asserts importance without evidence, compresses explanations into jargon, and fills space with signposts and stock phrases. This skill helps you generate new academic text from an author's material and revise existing text, so that a real reader can follow it and it reads as the work of a person who knows the subject. The rules come from long-standing writing guidance (Strunk, Gopen & Swan, Pinker, Williams), from physics and mathematics style authorities (Mermin, the AIP and APS style guides, Halmos, Knuth, Tsitsiklis), from journal author guidance and thesis guides, from research on thesis examination, and from corpus studies of AI-assisted text. Everything is paraphrased; `references/sources.md` lists every source with its licence. ## Ground rules These apply in every mode. Each one prevents a failure that is worse than the problem being fixed. 1. **Serve a named reader.** Before writing or revising, decide who reads the text and what they already know (`references/reader-and-structure.md`, R1). Most unreadable academic text was written for the author. 2. **The content comes from the author; citations come from verified sources.** Generate prose from the notes, data, results and derivations the author supplies. Never invent facts, numbers, result