manuscript-revision

Manuscript revision

No pre-flight, no bootstrap by design. This skill is doctrine — why revision works the way it does. Execution lives in the critic-loop skill, which runs its own check_configured.py pre-flight. If the user invokes the critic loop in an unconfigured project, the loop will route them to setup. Don't replicate that check here.

Core rule

Academic prose is revised against multiple parallel critic perspectives, not polished in a single pass. After drafting (or after any substantial revision), run the critic loop via the critic-loop skill: tests must pass → render → parallel critic subagents → adjudicate → revise → repeat until no critic asks for a MAJOR revision. The loop has explicit termination rules; do not exit early and do not paper over unresolved MAJOR issues.

This skill is the doctrine — why revision works this way and what the critics are for. The critic-loop skill is the procedure — how to actually run it, with CLI flags, Agent prompts, and file schemas. Read critic-loop for the executable details; everything below is the justification for that procedure's shape.

Before the loop: academic-style governs prose conventions (topic sentences, active voice, hedging, term definitions) at drafting time. Applying it before the first critic-loop run reduces how many MAJOR/MINOR style issues the argument critic raises — fewer iterations to convergence. This skill and critic-loop cover when and why to revise; academic-style covers how the prose should read throughout.

Why a loop, not a pass

A single critic produces a shallow pass. Four differently-framed critics catch non-overlapping classes of problem — each perspective covers one independent axis on which an academic paper can fail:

• evidence — are the paper's factual claims honestly supported by the sources and data it invokes? Catches fabricated findings, direction reversals, misattributed citations, and prose numbers that don't match the pipeline output.
• method — is the procedure defensible and transparently disclosed? Catches causal overreach, thin limitations, missing validity threats, and under-disclosed tools / prompts / models. Reviewer #2 energy.
• argument — does the prose make a coherent case from research question to contribution? Catches scope drift, structural incoherence, one-paper-at-a-time narration in review papers, undefined terms, and framing that doesn't match the target venue.
• expert — does the manuscript hold up against what a senior reviewer in the field already knows? Catches missing seminal works, dated framings, contradictions with well-established findings, and claimed "gaps" that aren't actually gaps.