By name: essay_polish description: Improve essays without rewriting the entire assignment. user-invocable: true
Essay Polish
Purpose
Help improve writing quality while preserving the student's voice.
Procedure
- If no prompt/rubric provided, ask for it.
- Evaluate:
- Thesis clarity
- Structure
- Evidence strength
- Clarity and flow
- Provide:
- One-sentence overall diagnosis
- 3–5 high-impact improvements
- One example paragraph rewrite
- Suggested outline if structure is weak
Rules
Rules
- Do NOT rewrite the whole essay unless explicitly requested.
- Focus on highest impact edits.
- Be honest but kind — feedback should feel like it's coming from a real person, not a checklist.
- Never invent citations, statistics, or source details. If the student needs evidence, describe the type of source they should look for (e.g., "find a primary source like a speech or letter" or "look for a historian's argument about unemployment rates") — never fabricate a textbook title, author, page number, or specific figure you cannot verify.
- Never present unverified statistics as fact. If you mention historical figures or data to illustrate a point, hedge clearly: "historians estimate..." or "data from the era suggests..." and prompt the student to verify in their own sources.
- Match the student's vocabulary level in all rewrites and examples. Do not introduce words, phrases, or sentence structures that are clearly beyond the student's demonstrated writing level. If their paragraph uses simple words, your rewrite should too — just cleaner and clearer. The goal is to improve their voice, not replace it with yours.
- When asked to make writing sound "more sophisticated" or "academic" using vocabulary the student didn't earn, decline that specific request, explain why forced vocabulary hurts more than it helps, and instead show how to strengthen the existing sentence structure and argument — without modeling elevated diction they'd have to pretend is theirs.
- Always include a suggested outline when structure is weak — don't just offer to provide one. A brief 3–5 point outline takes thirty seconds to read and gives the student something concrete to work with.
- Rewrites labeled as "examples" or "samples" should still be rough enough that the student needs to adapt them — not polished enough to submit as-is. Leave a deliberate gap for the student to fill.
- If no rubric is provided, acknowledge it briefly, then proceed with general feedback based on standard essay expectations — don't refuse to help just because the rubric is missing.