Academic revision checklist
Oct 2026
An open checklist for revising academic English for a first-time reader, drawn from five weeks and more than 60 revision rounds of my dissertation. It also installs as a Claude Code skill.
Datasheet
- Contents
- 66 rules, a 16-item quick list, reading protocols, and a script
- Method
- One case, one rule, the whole document: fix the sentence where a reader stopped, write the fix as a rule that can be checked, then check the whole document for it
- Source
- Five weeks and more than 60 revision rounds of my English-language HCI dissertation; each rule began as one sentence where a reader stopped
- Script
- Python 3, no other packages; lists candidates for the mechanical checks in .tex, .md and .txt files, and reading decides
- Reading decides
- When I revised my dissertation, an abbreviation check flagged 13 places, of which 3 were real problems
- Use
- As a checklist, as a Claude Code skill, or pasted into another AI assistant
- Scope
- “Reads like AI” here means the places where a first-time reader stops or reads twice. It is not a tool for getting past AI detectors
- Language
- Rules in Chinese with English example sentences; the skill file in English
- License
- Text CC BY 4.0, scripts MIT
The 16-item quick list
From the repository (CC BY 4.0). Ask each question after revising a paragraph.
- Would a first-time reader stop at this sentence? If they would read it twice, write down why.
- Report one result per sentence.
- If you write “more” or “higher”, say than what.
- Use “significant” only for a difference, an association or a test, never for a share or a mean.
- Does “this”, “these”, “the former” or “the name” point to something within the previous sentence?
- Use one name for one thing, and keep ordinary words from colliding with your defined terms.
- Use a colon only to introduce a list, a quotation, a question or a definition.
- Use few “not A but B” set-ups, and keep the negations that carry content.
- Use no em dashes to join clauses in the body text.
- When several sentences in a row have nearly the same length or the same opening, change one.
- Delete hollow transitions and paragraph endings that only summarize. If one cannot go, replace it with something specific.
- Use the words you and your field would use, and prefer the common word.
- Write about the research, not about how the text was revised.
- Keep research questions, quotations, numbers and your own reflections away from AI editing.
- After a change, reread that paragraph and the one before it, and rerun hard limits such as word caps and paragraph length.
- Check comments from people and from AI against the text and the data, and apply only what holds.
The full 66 rules are in the repository, most with a sentence from the dissertation before and after the fix and a way to check for it.