New: 98,000+ skills indexed from GitHub repos with 100+ stars · every skill safety-checkedBrowse top skillsTop skills
Esc to closeBrowse all skills
Submit a skillBrowse skills
Submit a skillBrowse skills

Agent skill

Focs Writing Style

by brycewang-stanford in brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills

A skill your agent uses when drafting or revising a FOCS (IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science) paper — making the first ten pages carry the whole case to a broad theory committee…

MITAuto-check passedWriting & Content

Install Focs Writing Style

skills CLI
$ npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill focs-writing-style -a claude-code

Project install by default; add -g for ~/.claude/skills/.

GitHub CLI
$ gh skill install brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills focs-writing-style --agent claude-code

Project scope by default; add --scope user for a personal install. Needs GitHub CLI 2.90.0 or later (public preview).

Manual copy
$ git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills.git skills-src && mkdir -p .claude/skills && cp -r skills-src/FOCS-Skills/skills/focs-writing-style .claude/skills/focs-writing-style && rm -rf skills-src

Use ~/.claude/skills/ instead of .claude/skills for a personal install. The folder must contain SKILL.md.

Claude Code skills documentation · loads skills from .claude/skills/

Facts

Skill name
focs-writing-style
GitHub stars
1.2k
Token cost
~1.6k tokens
SKILL.md length
790 words
Files
1
Skills in repo
2,387
Repo updated
First seen
Licence
MIT

At a glance

A skill your agent uses when drafting or revising a FOCS (IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science) paper — making the first ten pages carry the whole case to a broad theory committee…

  • Works in 4 steps: Ten-page audit: print pages 1–10 alone;… → Quantifier audit: every informal… → Confession audit: grep the LaTeX for… → …
  • Pairing informal and formal theorem statements
  • SKILL.md covers Budgeting the guaranteed pages, The informal/formal pairing, Prose calibration for a… and Double-blind prose, plus 3 more sections
  • Instructions only: no scripts, shell commands, URLs or credentials in SKILL.md

What it does

Focs Writing Style is an agent skill from brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills. Use when drafting or revising a FOCS (IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science) paper — making the first ten pages carry the whole case to a broad theory committee, pairing informal and formal theorem statements, keeping single-column 11-point prose readable, and writing double-blind-safe self-references.

Its SKILL.md is about 1.6k tokens, which your agent loads only when the skill is triggered. It is a single SKILL.md file with no bundled scripts.

It sits in Writing & Content, covering Brand voice and tone. The repository describes itself as: Journal-specific Claude Code/Codex skill packs covering mainstream journals — AER, QJE, Nature, Cell, 管理世界, 经济研究 & 200+ more — your fast track to getting published. ｜ 覆盖主流期刊的… The licence is MIT.

When your agent uses it

  • Pairing informal and formal theorem statements
  • Keeping single-column 11-point prose readable
  • Writing double-blind-safe self-references

Example prompts

  • “/focs-writing-style”

Workflow steps

4 steps, taken from the first numbered list in SKILL.md.

  1. Ten-page audit: print pages 1–10 alone; have a colleague reconstruct all
  2. Quantifier audit: every informal statement checked against its restatable
  3. Confession audit: grep the LaTeX for hedge phrases and discharge each.
  4. Blind audit: third-person self-references, metadata, acknowledgements.

What it can do on your machine

Read from SKILL.md and the folder at commit 932eb23. It shows what the files ask for, not the result of running them.

  • Tool permissions

    Pre-approves nothing: there is no allowed-tools line, so your agent's usual permission prompts apply.

    From allowed-tools in the SKILL.md frontmatter.

  • Runs code

    No scripts in the folder and no shell commands in SKILL.md (its code samples are latex).

    From the folder's file list and the shell code blocks in SKILL.md.

  • Network

    No URLs in SKILL.md.

    From URLs in SKILL.md, links to its own repository left out.

  • Credentials

    Names no API keys, tokens, secrets or passwords.

    From names ending in _API_KEY, _TOKEN, _SECRET, _KEY or _PASSWORD in SKILL.md.

Context cost

Focs Writing Style loads about 1.6k tokens when it runs. Until then it costs about 84 tokens; SKILL.md has 790 words of instructions outside code blocks.

Always · name and description, kept in context so the agent knows when to use it
~84
When it runs · the whole SKILL.md, loaded when a task matches
~1.6k

Estimates: characters ÷ 4, the usual rule of thumb; real counts depend on the model's tokenizer. Scripts and assets cost tokens only if the agent reads them.

Safety

Auto-check passed

The automated check found no risky patterns in SKILL.md.

Automated static check — not a guarantee. Review scripts before installing. It scans the text of SKILL.md for risky patterns (piping downloads into a shell, reading credential files, hidden Unicode, destructive commands); files beside SKILL.md are not scanned.

SKILL.md

The full file from brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills at commit 932eb23, republished under its MIT licence (© brycewang-stanford). 790 words, ~1,560 tokens.

Download SKILL.mdSave it as .claude/skills/focs-writing-style/SKILL.md (or your agent's skills folder).
name
focs-writing-style
description
Use when drafting or revising a FOCS (IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science) paper — making the first ten pages carry the whole case to a broad theory committee, pairing informal and formal theorem statements, keeping single-column 11-point prose readable, and writing double-blind-safe self-references.

FOCS Writing Style

FOCS submissions carry no length cap, and the CFP encourages submitting the full version of the paper — but everything outside the abstract, the references, and the first ten pages is read only at the committee's discretion (FOCS 2026 CFP, checked 2026-07-08). Style at this venue is therefore an exercise in front-loading: the opening ten pages must let a committee member from a different corner of TCS decide the paper's fate fairly, even if they never turn to page eleven.

Budgeting the guaranteed pages

A budget that survives contact with real papers:

PagesContentFailure mode it prevents
1–1.5Problem, headline theorem(s) informally, why they matterReviewer cannot state your result after page 2
1.5–3Context: prior bounds, the obstacle, your delta stated precisely"Novelty unclear" from a non-specialist
3–6Technical overview: the proof's actual ideas, with real definitions"Contribution may be incremental" — ideas were invisible
6–9.5Formal statements of all results; proof of one representative lemma in fullCommittee cannot check that formality matches the informal claims
9.5–10Organization note pointing into the bodyDiligent reviewer gets lost after the window

Every theorem you want credit for must be stated by page ten. A result whose first appearance is page 23 does not exist for most of the committee.

The informal/formal pairing

State each headline result twice: once in the introduction in plain language with all quantifiers honest, once formally with every hypothesis. Keep the two mechanically linked so they cannot drift apart across revisions:

latex
% preamble: restatable theorems, one source of truth
\usepackage{thmtools, thm-restate}
\declaretheorem[name=Theorem]{theorem}

% introduction (inside the ten-page window)
\begin{restatable}[Main]{theorem}{mainthm}\label{thm:main}
  For every $\varepsilon>0$ there is a deterministic
  $O(m^{1+\varepsilon})$-time algorithm that ...
\end{restatable}

% body or appendix, before the proof
\mainthm*
\begin{proof} ... \end{proof}

The thm-restate discipline is the cheapest insurance against the classic FOCS embarrassment: an introduction promising a bound the formal theorem quietly weakens.

Prose calibration for a cross-area committee

  • Quantify hedges. "Nearly linear" must resolve to $O(m,\mathrm{polylog},m)$ or $O(m^{1+o(1)})$ within a sentence; the two are different claims and committees notice.
  • One new notion per section opening. Single-column 11-point pages hold a lot of math; the reader's constraint is working memory, not ink. Introduce a definition, use it twice, then build on it.
  • Confession phrases are debts. Every "it is standard that", "one can verify", and "similarly" in the guaranteed pages will be audited by someone; each must either point at a numbered reference or be provable by a reader in under a minute.
  • Name your techniques. A committee remembers "the lazy-recoloring argument" and forgets "our second technical contribution". Naming is not vanity; it is compression for the PC discussion.
  • Write the obstacle paragraph. The single highest-leverage paragraph in a FOCS submission explains why the previous best approach could not give your result. It converts "difficult" from an adjective into an argument.
Show full SKILL.md (362 more words)Show less

Double-blind prose

FOCS has used double-blind review for several cycles (2023–2026 CFPs all require it), with the stated purpose of enabling an unbiased first judgment — not making authorship undiscoverable. The prose consequences:

  • Self-citations in the third person: "Chen et al. showed", never "we previously showed" — even when the antecedent is your own arXiv posting.
  • No acknowledgements, grant numbers, or lab-specific phrasing ("our group's earlier framework") at submission time.
  • Citing your own public full version is normal in this community; what is banned is prose that asserts the identity, not literature that permits a determined guess.

Abstract anatomy

The abstract is guaranteed reading and often the only text a non-assigned PC member sees before the discussion. A FOCS abstract that does its job contains, in order: the problem in one sentence; the main bound or theorem with honest quantifiers; the one-line comparison to the previous best; the technique named in a phrase; and, when the paper has them, the downstream consequences. What it omits: motivation boilerplate ("X is a fundamental problem"), citations, and any claim the formal theorems do not support. Write it last, from the restatable statements, so the abstract inherits their honesty.

Notation economy

Single-column pages at 11 point invite dense macro-heavy notation; committees across subareas punish it. Working rules:

  • Prefer words to fresh symbols for anything used fewer than three times; a fourth-order tensor of indexed families needs a name, an ad-hoc set does not.
  • Keep one notational convention per object class through the whole paper — a graph that is $G$ on page 2 must not become $\mathcal{G}$ on page 30 of the full version (statement-freeze tooling in focs-reproducibility catches drift in theorems, not prose; only discipline catches this).
  • Standard objects get standard symbols; novelty budget is spent on results, not on renaming expansion constants.

Revision pass order

  1. Ten-page audit: print pages 1–10 alone; have a colleague reconstruct all claimed results from them.
  2. Quantifier audit: every informal statement checked against its restatable twin.
  3. Confession audit: grep the LaTeX for hedge phrases and discharge each.
  4. Blind audit: third-person self-references, metadata, acknowledgements.

Do the passes in that order — narrative surgery invalidates later audits, so anonymity always goes last.

© brycewang-stanford, MIT. Rendered from Markdown: HTML in the file is shown as text, images as links, and headings moved down two levels. Raw file

Files

Just SKILL.md in FOCS-Skills/skills/focs-writing-style of brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills.

Open the folder on GitHubat commit 932eb23

Compare with similar skills

Focs Writing Style next to the 5 skills that share the most tags, products or categories with it. Stars are the repository's; “used in” counts other GitHub owners with a copy.

Focs Writing Style compared with similar skills
SkillStarsUsed inTokensAuto-checkLicenceRepo updated
Focs Writing Style this skillbrycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills1.2k—~1.6kAutomated safety check: PassMIT
Draft In Voicegarrytan/gbrain31k—~3.7kAutomated safety check: PassMIT
Product Marketing Contextminhnv0807/ai-business-skills609—~2.1kAutomated safety check: PassMIT
Cc Writing Stylefranklee16/academic-research-skills2231 repos~1kAutomated safety check: PassNone
Avoid AI Writingconorbronsdon/avoid-ai-writing4.9k3 repos~8.1kAutomated safety check: PassMIT
BrandOhh-889/skyroc79513 repos~733Automated safety check: PassMIT

Similar skills

  • Draft In Voice

    garrytan/gbrain

    Ghostwrite content in a specific person's voice from a VALIDATED voice profile — tweets, replies, short posts, launch copy, recruiting blurbs, emails.

    31k GitHub stars~3.7k tokensUpdated yesterday
    Writing & ContentAuto-check passed

  • Product Marketing Context

    minhnv0807/ai-business-skills

    Dung khi bat dau lam viec voi mot san pham hoac khach hang moi — skill nay tao FILE CONTEXT ma hon 60 skill khac se doc, gom san pham, khach hang, dinh vi, proof, objection, brand voice va KPI.

    609 GitHub stars~2.1k tokensUpdated 29 days ago
    Writing & ContentAuto-check passed

  • Cc Writing Style

    franklee16/academic-research-skills

    A skill your agent uses when polishing prose for a Cancer Cell (Cell Press) manuscript — the Summary/Introduction/Results/Discussion craft, claim calibration, and Cell Press nomenclature/house style.

    223 GitHub starsUsed in 1 repo~1k tokens
    Writing & ContentAuto-check passed

  • Avoid AI Writing

    conorbronsdon/avoid-ai-writing

    Audit and rewrite content to remove AI writing patterns ("AI-isms").

    4.9k GitHub starsUsed in 3 repos~8.1k tokens
    Writing & ContentAuto-check passed

  • Brand

    Ohh-889/skyroc

    Brand voice, visual identity, messaging frameworks, asset management, brand consistency.

    795 GitHub starsUsed in 13 repos~733 tokens
    Writing & ContentAuto-check passed

  • Khazix WeChat Article Writer

    KKKKhazix/khazix-skills

    Writes long-form WeChat official account articles in the personal style of the Khazix account, from briefs, links, PDFs or rough notes, with a topic quality check.

    21k GitHub starsUsed in 1 repo~2.9k tokens
    Writing & ContentAuto-check passed

More from brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills

All 2,387 skills in this repo

  • Aaag Data Analysis

    brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills

    A skill your agent uses when running and reporting the analysis for an Annals of the American Association of Geographers manuscript — spatial statistics and modeling, remote-sensing accuracy, or…

    1.2k GitHub stars~1.3k tokensUpdated 14 days ago
    Auto-check passed

  • Aaag Literature Positioning

    brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills

    A skill your agent uses when positioning an Annals of the American Association of Geographers manuscript in the literature — engaging geographic scholarship across the relevant area and the…

    1.2k GitHub stars~1.3k tokensUpdated 14 days ago
    Auto-check passed

  • Aaag Rebuttal

    brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills

    A skill your agent uses when responding to an Annals of the American Association of Geographers decision letter (major/minor revision) — building a point-by-point response to the subject editor and…

    1.2k GitHub stars~1.4k tokensUpdated 14 days ago
    Auto-check passed

  • Aaag Research Design

    brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills

    A skill your agent uses when defending the research design of an Annals of the American Association of Geographers manuscript — spatial/quantitative analysis and GIScience, remote-sensing and…

    1.2k GitHub stars~1.4k tokensUpdated 14 days ago
    Auto-check passed

  • Aaag Review Process

    brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills

    A skill your agent uses when you need to understand how the Annals of the American Association of Geographers evaluates a manuscript — double-anonymous review routed through a subject editor by…

    1.2k GitHub stars~1.3k tokensUpdated 14 days ago
    Auto-check passed

  • Aaag Submission

    brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills

    A skill your agent uses when running the final pre-submission preflight for the Annals of the American Association of Geographers via ScholarOne Manuscripts — area/article-type selection…

    1.2k GitHub stars~1.6k tokensUpdated 14 days ago
    Auto-check passed

Categories

Questions about Focs Writing Style

What does Focs Writing Style do?

A skill your agent uses when drafting or revising a FOCS (IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science) paper — making the first ten pages carry the whole case to a broad theory committee…. Focs Writing Style is an agent skill from brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills. Use when drafting or revising a FOCS (IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science) paper — making the first ten pages carry the whole case to a broad theory committee, pairing informal and formal theorem statements, keeping single-column 11-point prose readable, and writing double-blind-safe self-references.

When should I use Focs Writing Style?

Focs Writing Style fits situations like: pairing informal and formal theorem statements; keeping single-column 11-point prose readable; writing double-blind-safe self-references.

How do I install Focs Writing Style in Claude Code?

Run `npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill focs-writing-style -a claude-code`. Or copy the skill folder (FOCS-Skills/skills/focs-writing-style in brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills) into .claude/skills/focs-writing-style in your project. Claude Code loads it when a task matches its description.

How do I install Focs Writing Style in Codex?

Run `npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill focs-writing-style -a codex`. Or copy the skill folder (FOCS-Skills/skills/focs-writing-style in brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills) into .agents/skills/focs-writing-style in your project. Codex loads it when a task matches its description.

Can I use Focs Writing Style in Cursor, Gemini CLI or GitHub Copilot?

Cursor, Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot and OpenCode also load SKILL.md folders. With the skills CLI, run `npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill focs-writing-style -a cursor` (or -a gemini-cli, github-copilot or opencode for the others). To copy it by hand, put the folder in .cursor/skills/focs-writing-style, .gemini/skills/focs-writing-style, .github/skills/focs-writing-style and .opencode/skills/focs-writing-style in your project.

What does Focs Writing Style need to run?

SKILL.md names no scripts, command-line tools or credentials: Focs Writing Style is instructions for the agent only.

Does Focs Writing Style access the network?

SKILL.md contains no URLs. Any network use would come from the scripts or tools the agent runs. This is read from the text; nothing was executed.

Is Focs Writing Style safe to install?

Our automated static check of SKILL.md found no risky patterns, such as piping downloads into a shell, reading credential files or hidden Unicode. It is not a guarantee. Review the folder before installing.

What licence does Focs Writing Style use?

Focs Writing Style is published under the MIT licence (the repository's licence). It allows redistribution, so the full SKILL.md is shown on this page.

How many tokens does Focs Writing Style use?

About 1.6k tokens (SKILL.md is roughly 6.2k characters). Agents keep only the skill's name and description in context until a task matches; then they load SKILL.md in full.

What are the alternatives to Focs Writing Style?

Skills that share tags, products or a category with Focs Writing Style: Draft In Voice (garrytan/gbrain, 31k stars), Product Marketing Context (minhnv0807/ai-business-skills, 609 stars), Cc Writing Style (franklee16/academic-research-skills, 223 stars) and Avoid AI Writing (conorbronsdon/avoid-ai-writing, 4.9k stars). The comparison table on this page puts their stars, adoption, token cost, safety result and licence side by side.

Who maintains Focs Writing Style?

brycewang-stanford (a GitHub user) maintains it in brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills, which has 1,231 GitHub stars. The repository holds 2,387 skills in this directory. The repository was last updated on September 27, 2026.

Source: brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills on GitHub. Facts on this page come from the repository at the commit we read; the author's words are quoted as theirs.