polish-writing

Polish writing

Invariants (never violate)

• Do not change numbers, theorem statements, hypotheses, citations, labels or math.
• Do not strengthen claims ("shows" → "proves", "up to" → "always").
• Keep LaTeX commands intact; do not introduce packages.
• In the last 24 hours before a deadline: no style passes at all, only error fixes.
• Output: revised text + a short modification log (what and why) so the author can accept/reject each change.

Pass 1 — de-AI

Replace or delete:

avoid	prefer
leverage, utilize	use
delve into, explore (as a result)	examine, study (or state the result)
pivotal, crucial, paramount	important, key (or delete)
underscore, highlight (as filler)	show
tapestry, landscape, realm	(delete; name the area)
seamless(ly), robust (without a metric)	(delete or quantify)
"It is worth noting that", "Notably,"	(delete; state the fact)
"In this paper, we aim to"	"We ..."
"First and foremost", "Last but not least"	(delete)
"plays a crucial role in"	"determines", "dominates" (be specific)
"novel" about own work	(delete; let the reader judge)
"significantly" without numbers	the number
"obviously", "it is easy to see"	give the one-line reason, or delete

Also: convert itemize inside running text into connected prose when the items are reasoning steps (keep lists for contributions/parameters); avoid three connectives in a row; vary sentence openings; no rhetorical questions in the body.

Pass 2 — concision

• One idea per sentence; aim for ≤ 30 words.
• Remove throat-clearing openers and doubled phrases ("in order to" → "to", "the fact that" → "that", "a number of" → "several"/the number).
• Prefer verbs over nominalisations ("perform an evaluation of" → "evaluate").
• Active voice for what we did; passive is fine for standard facts.
• Avoid dashes as sentence punctuation (use commas, colons, or split sentences).

Pass 3 — consistency

• Terminology: one name per concept (framework name, stage names, baseline names). Build a term list from the notation table and grep for variants (e.g. "bootstrap"/"bootstrapping", "look-up table"/"lookup table", "LUT").
• Notation: symbols match the notation table; no symbol reused with two meanings; vectors/matrices consistently bold or not.
• Spelling variety: pick US or UK and stay with it.
• Capitalisation of references: Section~\ref, Table~\ref, or \Cref consistently; non-breaking spaces before \cite and \ref.
• Numbers: consistent units and precision (e.g. 2 significant digits for ratios); \times spacing consistent; thin space before units.

Pass 4 — Chinese → English (for drafts written in Chinese)

1. Translate meaning, not word order: Chinese topic-comment sentences often become English subject-verb sentences with the conclusion first.
2. Split long Chinese sentences joined by commas (一逗到底) into several English sentences.
3. Watch for common calques: "has important significance" → "matters because ..."; "realize/achieve an algorithm" → "implement"; "the proposed scheme" repeated → name it once, then "our scheme"/its name; "in recent years" as an opener → delete or give the year range; "greatly improve" → the number.
4. Articles: every singular countable noun needs a/the; "the" for things already introduced or unique ("the bootstrapping procedure of [X]").
5. Tense: present for facts and what the paper does; past for what prior work did or for experiments that were run.
6. Produce three parts: [LaTeX] English text, [Back-translation] literal Chinese of the English (so the author can check meaning), [Log] list of changes.

Pass 5 — read-aloud check

Read the abstract and the first page aloud (or via TTS). Any sentence that needs a second breath gets split.