scientific-prose-style

scientific-prose-style

Rules for the prose of a scientific paper — the sentences of the abstract, introduction, results, and discussion. Load this whenever you draft or revise manuscript text. (Figure planning lives in figure-planner; this skill is about words on the page.)

This skill owns punctuation and rhythm only, and it runs last. When a passage is hard to follow for reasons punctuation cannot fix, such as an unstable claim, a missing evidence link, or a paragraph whose job is unclear, fix that first with manuscript-optimizer or scientific-writing. Re-punctuating a sentence whose scientific role is wrong does not make it readable, and polishing a drifted Review before its review-article-architecture drift audit makes the drift harder to see.

One layer sits directly above this one. anti-defensive-writing owns authorial posture at the paragraph level: what a paragraph leads with, where a caveat sits, and whether a sentence exists to advance the argument or to pre-empt an objection. Run it first. Stripping defensive scaffolding rewrites paragraph openers and sentence boundaries, which is exactly what Rule 3 and Rule 5 below then have to settle, so running this skill first means doing that work twice. Rule 3 here calibrates hedges within a sentence; deciding whether the hedge should exist at all belongs upstairs.

Rule 1 — Em-dash budget (the headline rule)

The long em-dash (—) is the single most overused mark in generated scientific prose. It feels punchy in isolation but a reader hits three or four per paragraph and it reads as a stylistic tic, not as writing. Cap it.

• At most one em-dash per paragraph, and none in the abstract. If a sentence already has one, the next clause that wants a dash gets a different mark.
• Never use a pair of em-dashes to bracket an aside if a comma pair or parentheses would do — the double dash is the worst offender.
• Prefer, in rough order: comma (mild pause), colon (a list or an expansion of what precedes), parentheses (a true aside the sentence reads fine without), or split into two sentences (the strongest fix for a long dash-spliced line).