academic-writing

A set of rules for academic writing and research notes. It defines note templates, chapter and section naming, reference formatting, British English, and how sources connect to thesis arguments.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when recording sources, organising thesis chapters, linking evidence to arguments, or checking academic wording and structure.
Why use it?
It keeps reading notes and thesis chapters consistent, traceable, and easier to review. It also requires page numbers for direct quotations.

Cursor rule for Cursor

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add rules/yha9806/academic-writing-toolkit/academic-writing
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/yha9806/academic-writing-toolkit

Made for: Cursor.

Per session 354 This file is loaded in full into every session.
When invoked 354 The same file — it is already loaded in full.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00354 $0.00354
Opus 5 $0.00177 $0.00177
Sonnet 5 $0.00071 $0.00071
Haiku 4.5 $0.00035 $0.00035

Measured yesterday against content hash 2a744af5fa3b, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

academic-writing scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured yesterday.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

.cursor/rules/academic-writing.mdc · 32 lines

What it actually says

Notes Format

Reading notes use a standardised template (literature/reading_notes/_template_NOTES.md) with required fields:

  • Status: reading | completed | integrated
  • Relevance: chapter and section reference (e.g. "Ch3 S3.2 — supports argument about X")
  • Thesis Connections table: maps note points to chapters, sections, and connection types (supports / challenges / extends)
  • Key Terms table: term, translation (if applicable), definition in context
  • Direct quotes must include page numbers: > "quote" (p.N)

Chapter Structure

  • Chapters live in chapters/, named ch{N}_{slug}.md
  • Sections numbered hierarchically: ## N.1, ### N.1.1
  • Each chapter ends with a ## References section (Harvard style)
  • Template available at chapters/_template.md

Writing Principles

  • Read first, write later — complete reading notes for all sources before editing chapter text
  • British English throughout thesis text (favour, analyse, behaviour, programme)
  • One notes file per source — every PDF/text gets its own _NOTES.md in literature/reading_notes/
  • Max 15 pages per read invocation; max 90 pages per conversation

Cursor Note

For full skill functionality (/read, /note, /verify, etc.), use Claude Code, Codex CLI, or Gemini CLI. Cursor rules provide baseline writing conventions only.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. yesterday First seen · 32 lines · 354 tokens per session scan A 2a744af5fa3b

Subscribe to this mod's changes

academic-writing is a cursor rule published in the GitHub repository yha9806/academic-writing-toolkit (30 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 354 tokens to every session, about $0.0018 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.