Your Writing Is Drifting and You Won't Notice
The ideas are still yours. So is the theorising, and most of the sentences. The writing drifts anyway. Marginalia learns how you write from your own published work, then flags where a draft stopped sounding like you.
If you work anything like I do, AI is already somewhere in your writing pipeline. It checks the grammar, gets you past a blank morning, smooths a transition you’d already rewritten four times, and confirms your reference list still reflects the literature before adjusting the text to match.
The thinking stays yours through all of that, from the first idea to the shape of the argument. You still type most of the sentences yourself.
The writing drifts anyway.
Read a section back a week later and it no longer sounds like you. The sentences are shorter than the ones you write. Your hedges have moved to the front of the clause, where you’d normally bury them. Words you have never once typed (delve, multifaceted, intricate) have quietly settled in. The prose is smoother than anything you write.
That’s drift, and it’s hard to catch because it arrives one acceptable edit at a time. Across a chapter, no single suggestion is wrong enough to reject.
Citations go the same way, with worse consequences. AI-assisted drafts carry references that don’t exist, references with the wrong year, and real references that don’t support the claim attached. That last kind gets through review.
The papers, chapters and grants you finished before these tools existed are a fixed record of how you write, so you can measure a draft against them.
I built a tool for academics that does this, called Marginalia.
What it does
Marginalia learns your voice from your finished writing and tells you where a draft stopped behaving like you. It also checks that every citation exists, is accurate, and says what you claim.
Most writing tools hold you to generic rules about good writing. Shorten that sentence. Cut the passive. Marginalia holds you to your own corpus. If your sentences run long and clause-dense, it won’t tell you to trim them, only that a draft stopped running that way.
It reports what it found and leaves the decision to you. It never edits a file without showing you the change.
Getting it
I use it with Claude Code, so it ships set up as a skill for that. It isn’t tied to Claude though. Almost everything it knows is plain English rather than code, so it ports to Codex, Gemini CLI or whatever you use. Clone the repo, open your assistant in the folder, and ask it to set itself up. The repo explains its own structure, so the assistant installs the skills and builds your profile from your own writing, PDFs and Word files included.
github.com/xkiwilabs/marginalia
Point it at your own back catalogue before you point it at a draft. One piece is enough to start, though a profile built from fewer than three is marked low confidence.
Michael Richardson Professor, School of Psychological Sciences Faculty of Medicine, Health and Human Sciences Macquarie University
AI Disclosure: I wrote this article with help from AI tools, including Claude. The ideas and experiences described here are my own. The AI helped me draft and edit the text. I use AI openly in my research and teaching, and I encourage others to do the same.