Pre Submission Reviewer

---
name: pre-submission-reviewer
description: >-
  Runs a pre-submission review of a technical paper across five
  dimensions: macro logic, writing details, English grammar, LaTeX
  formatting, and figure quality. Uses a reviewer-style severity
  taxonomy (CRITICAL / MAJOR / MINOR) and flags banned AI-tone
  vocabulary and em-dash misuse. Use when the user asks to 'review
  this paper', 'audit before submission', 'check the draft', 'find
  issues', 'proofread', or within one week of a submission
  deadline.
license: CC-BY-4.0
---

# Pre-Submission Reviewer

## Overview

Three to five days before a submission deadline is the window where
a careful external review pays off most. This skill takes a full
paper or key sections and produces a structured review across five
dimensions, each with severity-tagged findings and concrete
rewrite suggestions. It enforces the mechanical rules from the
writing-checklist section (no em-dashes, no banned AI-tone
vocabulary, leading text per paragraph, topic-sentence discipline,
citation-format uniformity) and surfaces the patterns that
non-native English-speaking authors most commonly violate
(articles, subject-verb agreement, tense consistency, which versus
that, Chinglish phrasing).

The output is not a rewrite. It is a prioritised list of findings
with severity tags; the author decides which to fix. CRITICAL items
should block submission until addressed.

## When to use this skill

- Three to five days before a submission deadline.
- The user asks to 'review this paper', 'audit before submission',
  'check the draft', 'find issues', 'proofread'.
- After a camera-ready revision, before sending the final version.
- After any major rewrite (rebuttal responses, Section 3 overhaul).
- When the user suspects AI-tone contamination in a section.

## When NOT to use this skill

- The paper is still being structured. Use `tech-paper-template`,
  `intro-drafter`, or `benchmark-paper-template` (separate plugin) first.
- The user wants structural advice rather than review. Use the
  drafting skills instead.

## Core procedure

### Step 1: Dimension 1 Macro logic review

See: references/logic-and-structure.md for the Logic First rule,
Self-contained rule, Leading Text rule, and Running Example rule.

Check:

- **Read the shared narrative plan first** (`outputs/.plans/<slug>.md`,
  written by paper-narrative): judge the paper against its declared
  mainline and contribution type, not against one fixed template.
- Introduction flowchart is intact (Background, Limitations, Goal
  or Key Idea, Challenges, Methodology, Contributions) — **for
  technique/system papers**. Theory papers: intro must state the
  recognized gap the result closes and the result's meaning before
  technicalities. Benchmark papers: intro must justify why existing
  metrics cannot answer the target question. Section count per se is
  never a finding.
- Contributions map to what actually delivers them — modules and
  section numbers for system papers; theorems/proofs for theory papers;
  the measurement construction and validation for benchmark papers.
- Experiments validate the paper's main claims, not tangential
  ones.
- Related Work covers the necessary prior art.
- Running example is consistent across Introduction, Methodology,
  Experiments.

Every break in the chain is CRITICAL.

### Step 2: Dimension 2 Writing details review

See: references/logic-and-structure.md for paragraph-level rules.

Check:

- Every paragraph has a topic sentence.
- Paragraphs transition smoothly; no orphan paragraphs.
- Paragraphs are not over 10 lines; split if so.
- No repeated or redundant passages.
- Abstract covers problem, method, result.

### Step 3: Dimension 3 English grammar review

See: references/grammar-rules.md for the canonical list of errors
common to non-native English authors, with corrections and
examples.

Check the usual suspects:

- Article use (a, an, the).
- Subject-verb agreement (third-person singular).
- Tense consistency (Related Work past, method present).
- Passive-voice overuse.
- Which versus that.
- Sentence length; split long sentences at "Specifically,".
- Chinglish patterns.

### Step 4: Dimension 4 LaTeX format review

See: references/latex-rules.md for the canonical list of LaTeX-
specific issues.

Check:

- Equation numbering contiguous; every numbered equation
  referenced.
- Figures and tables have captions; captions are detailed.
- Citations use the correct command and the non-breaking tilde
  (for example, `ResNet~\cite{X}`, never `ResNet\cite{X}`).
- Labels use underscores, not spaces or hyphens.
- Vector figure format; no raster.
- Page-limit compliance.

### Step 5: Dimension 5 Figure quality review

See: references/forbidden-patterns.md for chartjunk patterns and
the full figure-quality checklist.

For each figure:

- Vector format.
- Font size large enough post-scaling.
- Colour-blind-safe palette; dual encoding.
- Self-contained caption with a finding in the first sentence.
- No chartjunk.
- Motivated example is concrete and failure-revealing.
- Solution overview has labels matching section titles.

### Step 6: Banned-vocabulary and em-dash scan

See: references/forbidden-patterns.md for the banned-word list.

Scan the full paper for:

- Em-dashes used as sentence connectors (banned; project rule).
- AI-tone words: innovative, pioneering, revolutionary paradigm,
  transformative framework, superior, surpass, excel, remarkable,
  unprecedented, breakthrough performance, general-purpose, is
  capable of, notably, yet, yielding, at its essence, encompass,
  differentiate, reveal, underscore, pave the way for, highlight
  the potential of, profound challenges, stems from, rigid,
  impede.

Flag each occurrence with a severity tag. Em-dashes are MAJOR by
default; banned AI-tone words are MAJOR if they appear three or
more times.

### Step 7: Section-by-section review

See: references/section-guides.md for the per-section writing
guides for Abstract, Introduction, Problem Formulation, Framework
or Method, Experiments, Related Work, and Conclusion.

For each section, check that the section's content matches the
guide's canonical structure **as conditioned by the shared narrative plan
and contribution type** (read outputs/.plans/<slug>.md first): the
canonical forms (e.g. Abstract's what/why/challenges/how/results) are
defaults for technique papers, not cross-type blockers — theory papers
lead with the gap closed and the result's meaning; benchmark papers lead
with why existing metrics cannot answer the target question.

### Step 8: Integrity gate

Run the checks in the Integrity gate section below.

### Step 9: Output

Emit the review in the Output format below.

## Severity taxonomy

- **CRITICAL**: evidence or method errors that invalidate the
  central claim. Example: contributions do not map to any deliverable
  section; a central claim has no supporting evidence of any valid
  type; missing key baseline; page-limit violation.
- **MAJOR**: fixable scope/structure problems reviewers would flag
  in round one (claim-evidence mismatch, abandoned running example,
  broken cross-references).
- **MINOR**: taste and format. Style preferences the author actually
  holds (word choices, dash usage) are applied as style, never
  escalated; figure format is judged by information and resolution
  (vector preferred for line diagrams; photography judged as imaging
  results). Taste never determines whether the paper stands.
- **MAJOR**: reviewers will flag in first round. Example:
  topic-sentence absent from 3+ paragraphs; em-dash in 5+ places;
  banned AI-tone word in 3+ places; Table 1 comparison missing;
  chart type mismatched with data.
- **MINOR**: polish. Example: two long sentences that could be
  split; default Matplotlib styling; single article error.

## Integrity gate

Each bullet is tagged [inspection] (LLM verifies from the paper
text) or [attestation] (LLM runs the procedure and states it has
done so; user remains responsible for confirming completeness).

Before emitting the review:

1. **[inspection]** Every finding quotes specific text (sentence,
   phrase, figure name); no "the Introduction is unclear" without
   a quoted line.
2. **[inspection]** Every CRITICAL finding has a concrete fix
   suggestion, not "rewrite entirely".
3. **[inspection]** No fabricated quotes: only text actually
   present in the submitted material.
4. **[inspection]** Severity assignments follow the taxonomy;
   nothing is marked CRITICAL for taste reasons.
5. **[inspection]** Dimension 3 (grammar) findings cite the
   specific grammar rule from `references/grammar-rules.md`.
6. **[attestation]** Dimension 6 banned-vocabulary scan is run in
   full on the entire paper, not sampled. The skill attests the
   full scan; if the paper is extremely long, the skill states it
   chunked the input and describes the chunking strategy.
7. **[inspection]** Final score matches the CRITICAL + MAJOR
   count; a score of 9 or 10 requires zero CRITICAL and at most
   two MAJOR items.

If any [inspection] check fails, mark the output as "needs user
attention". For [attestation] bullets, the skill states the scope
of its scan and the user confirms completeness.

## Output format

### Summary
- CRITICAL: <n>
- MAJOR: <m>
- MINOR: <k>
- Top three fixes first: ...

### Dimension 1: Macro logic
| # | Finding | Severity | Suggested fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | <quoted text> | CRITICAL or MAJOR or MINOR | <fix> |

### Dimension 2: Writing details
<same table shape>

### Dimension 3: English grammar
<same table shape, citing grammar-rule ID>

### Dimension 4: LaTeX format
<same table shape>

### Dimension 5: Figure quality
<same table shape>

### Banned-vocabulary and em-dash scan
<list with line references>

### Integrity gate result
- Gate 1 through 7: <pass or fail>

### Final score (1-10)
<score>

### Submission recommendation
- <Ready to submit | Needs 1-2 days more work | Needs major revision before submission>