Agent Skills
› brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills
› ci-writing-style
ci-writing-style
GitHub用于起草或润色《Critical Inquiry》期刊论文的写作风格，确保文字清晰、有力且符合字数限制。重点优化句式与段落结构，剔除冗余和套话，使文风既严谨又具可读性，同时严格控制在9500词以内（含注释）。
Trigger Scenarios
起草论文开头或进行最终风格润色
文章超过9500词上限需要删减
论点有力但行文平淡、冗长或晦涩
调整语调以平衡严谨性与生动性
Install
npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill ci-writing-style -g -y
SKILL.md
Frontmatter
{
"name": "ci-writing-style",
"description": "Use when drafting or polishing the prose of a Critical Inquiry (CI) essay so it meets the journal's bar for ambitious, lucid critical writing and fits the word limit (articles ≤ 9,500 words including discursive notes and all bibliographical information; Critical Responses ≤ 3,000; Reviews ≤ 500). Tightens style and discipline; it does not invent argument or evidence."
}
Writing Style (ci-writing-style)
A Critical Inquiry essay must read as ambitious, precise, and alive — prose worthy of the claim, legible to a reader from another field, and disciplined to the word limit. This skill is about how the essay sounds and how tightly it is cut, not about generating the argument.
When to trigger
- Drafting the opening or doing a final stylistic polish
- Over the 9,500-word cap (which counts notes) and needing to cut
- The argument is strong but the prose is flat, baggy, or opaque
- Tuning the register so it is rigorous without being airless
Write to CI's bar
- Clarity is the highest ambition. Difficulty should come from the ideas, never from the sentences. Say the hard thing plainly.
- Voice with control. CI prose can be vivid and essayistic, but every flourish must carry argument. Style serves the claim, not the author's persona.
- Show the reading. Move close to the text or image; let the analysis breathe rather than
asserting conclusions (see
ci-evidence-and-objects). - Address the discipline-crossing reader. Define terms on first use; an art historian should
follow a literary essay and vice versa (see
ci-structure-and-exposition).
Fit the word cap (notes are counted)
- The limit includes discursive notes and all bibliographical information — prune footnote essays
and bloated citations as hard as body text (see
ci-citation-and-style). - Cut throat-clearing, redundant examples, and the second sentence that restates the first.
- Replace summary of others with a single precise sentence and a citation.
- Prefer one deep reading to three shallow ones.
Sentences and paragraphs
- Vary sentence length; let a short sentence land the claim.
- One idea per paragraph; topic the paragraph to the argument, not the example.
- Quote sparingly and exactly; integrate quotation into your syntax.
- Kill the cliché ("always already," "interrogate," "troubling") unless it does real work.
Anti-patterns
- Opacity mistaken for depth; jargon standing in for thought
- A glittering style that outruns the argument
- An abstractly theoretical voice that never touches the object
- Footnotes that quietly blow the word budget
- Padding a Critical Response or Review past its cap
Style execution pass for Critical Inquiry
Treat this skill as an executable review pass, not a prose hint. First lock the object, theoretical stakes, interpretive turn, and permission/citation discipline; then judge whether the current manuscript answers the venue's real reader: humanities reviewers who expect a strong interpretive intervention rather than an empirical-results narrative.
- Do the pass: Rewrite the first two pages so each paragraph starts from the venue-level claim, not from chronology or method inventory; preserve exact source-map limits and move technical overflow to appendix or supplement.
- Return a ledger: give
claim / evidence / risk / manuscript locationrows, so the next agent can edit rather than rediscover the issue. - Sibling guard: compare against PMLA for literary-field reach, New Literary History for theory/history, Representations for historically grounded cultural analysis; if a sibling owns the contribution, recommend re-routing before polishing format.
- Stop condition: do not give submission-ready advice until the pack's
resources/official-source-map.mdhas been checked for volatile rules and the manuscript has one concrete fix for the largest venue-specific risk.
Output format
【Clarity】hard ideas, plain sentences? [Y/N]
【Voice】flourishes carry argument? [Y/N]
【Cross-field legibility】terms glossed? [Y/N]
【Word count】≤ 9,500 incl. notes + all bibliographical info (or ≤ 3,000 / ≤ 500)?
【Cuts identified】throat-clearing / redundant examples / fat notes
【Next】ci-citation-and-style
Supplementary resources
../../resources/external_tools.md— the word-count rule and note discipline../../resources/official-source-map.md— word caps for each CI format
Version History
- 1839142 Current 2026-07-05 12:49
