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Agent skill

Stoc Writing Style

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

A skill your agent uses when drafting or revising a STOC (ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing) paper — the theorem-forward first page, informal/formal statement pairing, the technical-overview…

MITAuto-check passedWriting & Content

Install Stoc Writing Style

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

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

GitHub CLI
$ gh skill install brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills stoc-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/STOC-Skills/skills/stoc-writing-style .claude/skills/stoc-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
stoc-writing-style
GitHub stars
1.2k
Token cost
~1.7k tokens
SKILL.md length
867 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 STOC (ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing) paper — the theorem-forward first page, informal/formal statement pairing, the technical-overview…

  • Works in 4 steps: The skim pass: read only the abstract,… → The skeptic pass: at every "clearly,"… → The breadth pass: find the three… → …
  • Revising a STOC (ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing) paper — the theorem-forward first page
  • SKILL.md covers The first page: theorem before…, The technical overview is the…, Notation economy and Sentence-level house norms, plus 5 more sections
  • Instructions only: no scripts, shell commands, URLs or credentials in SKILL.md

What it does

Stoc Writing Style is an agent skill from brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills. Use when drafting or revising a STOC (ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing) paper — the theorem-forward first page, informal/formal statement pairing, the technical-overview section that carries acceptance, notation economy for a cross-area committee, and prose that survives the twelve guaranteed pages.

Its SKILL.md is about 1.7k 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

  • Revising a STOC (ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing) paper — the theorem-forward first page
  • Informal/formal statement pairing
  • The technical-overview section that carries acceptance
  • Notation economy for a cross-area committee

Example prompts

  • “/stoc-writing-style”

Workflow steps

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

  1. The skim pass: read only the abstract, ToC, section heads, and theorem
  2. The skeptic pass: at every "clearly," "standard," and "it follows,"
  3. The breadth pass: find the three sentences a distributed-computing (or
  4. The consistency pass: every constant, exponent, and model detail in the

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

Stoc Writing Style loads about 1.7k tokens when it runs. Until then it costs about 81 tokens; SKILL.md has 867 words of instructions outside code blocks.

Always · name and description, kept in context so the agent knows when to use it
~81
When it runs · the whole SKILL.md, loaded when a task matches
~1.7k

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). 867 words, ~1,747 tokens.

Download SKILL.mdSave it as .claude/skills/stoc-writing-style/SKILL.md (or your agent's skills folder).
name
stoc-writing-style
description
Use when drafting or revising a STOC (ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing) paper — the theorem-forward first page, informal/formal statement pairing, the technical-overview section that carries acceptance, notation economy for a cross-area committee, and prose that survives the twelve guaranteed pages.

STOC Writing Style

A STOC submission is read by two different people you must satisfy at once: a program-committee member from a neighboring sub-area deciding whether the result is a big deal, and a specialist subreviewer deciding whether it is true. STOC's reading contract (abstract + table of contents + first twelve pages guaranteed; STOC 2026 CFP, checked 2026-07-08) forces both conversations into the same window. The house style below is how successful papers manage that.

The first page: theorem before context

Theory flagship papers state the result almost immediately, then earn it. The standard device is the informal/formal pair:

latex
\begin{theorem}[Main result, informal]\label{thm:main-informal}
Every $n$-vertex planar graph admits a spanning structure of weight
$O(\log n)$ times optimal, computable in near-linear time.
\end{theorem}
% Section 2 then states Theorem 2.1, the formal version with the exact
% model, the constant regime, and the failure probability — and the text
% says explicitly: "Theorem 1.1 is the special case of Theorem 2.1 with
% \epsilon = 1/2."

Rules for the pair: the informal statement may simplify but must not lie (no hidden model changes, no suppressed hypotheses that reverse the interest of the result); and the formal statement must be findable from it in one hop.

The technical overview is the paper

Modern STOC papers devote two to four of the twelve pages to a section titled "Technical Overview" or "Our Techniques." This is where acceptance is decided:

  • Narrate the proof as a sequence of obstacles and moves: what the natural approach is, exactly where it breaks, and what new idea gets past the break.
  • Attribute honestly inside the overview — "steps 1–2 follow [XY]; the novelty is step 3" reads as confidence, and subreviewers will reconstruct the attribution anyway.
  • Use one running example or one figure if the construction is geometric; cross-area readers hold pictures longer than notation.
  • The overview must be faithful to the real proof. An overview describing last month's broken strategy while the appendix executes a different one is a correctness flag reviewers specifically look for.

Notation economy

HabitWhy it matters at STOC
Introduce notation at first use, never in a front-loaded glossary dumpCross-area PC members drop off during page-2 symbol walls
Prefer words for one-off concepts ("the heavy vertices") over fresh symbolsEvery symbol is a tax on the non-specialist reader
State parameter regimes next to results, not in a global convention"Throughout, $\varepsilon < 1/\log n$" declared on page 3 and used on page 40 will be missed
Reserve display math for statements that get referencedInline-display balance is how twelve pages stay readable
Standard names for standard thingsRenaming expanders or conductance costs goodwill and space

Sentence-level house norms

  • Claims are exact: "we give a $1.99$-approximation" not "we significantly improve the approximation ratio." Theory readers convert vague claims to the weakest consistent reading.
  • "To the best of our knowledge" once, if ever; a related-work section that actually knows the literature (stoc-related-work) does this job.
  • Open problems at the end are a genre convention and a service: two or three crisp questions, each with its parameterization pinned down.
  • Under double-blind (in force for STOC 2026), self-reference goes third person: "extending the technique of [12]" even when [12] is you.
Show full SKILL.md (401 more words)Show less

Budgeting the twelve pages

A workable allocation for a single-result paper: one page of introduction and main statement; one to two pages of context, related work, and open problems; two to four pages of technical overview; the remainder for preliminaries plus the proof spine of the main theorem, with routine steps deferred under the pointer discipline of stoc-supplementary. Two smells that the budget failed:

  • Preliminaries bloat — three pages of imported definitions before anything new happens. Compress by citing standard sources and defining only what the overview needs.
  • Statement crowding — eight theorems in the window, none proved there. Committees prefer one theorem they believe over eight they must take on faith; demote secondary results to a single summarizing paragraph.

Titles and abstracts, theory register

  • Titles state the result when the result is statable: "Undirected ST-Connectivity in Log-Space" is the genre's ideal — problem plus resource bound, no verbs of enthusiasm. Technique-forward titles ("... via Lazy Hierarchies") are the accepted alternative when the technique is the story.
  • Self-deprecating precision is house-respected: a title admitting the improvement is slight, with the barrier story carried inside, reads as confidence (see the exemplars library for a Best Paper that did exactly this).
  • The abstract carries exact bounds and models, because theory abstracts are read as claims: any constant, exponent, or model qualifier in the abstract is quotable and will be quoted.
  • No citations in the abstract by convention; name prior bounds ("improving the best known $O(\log^2 n)$") and cite in the introduction.

Revision passes that pay at this venue

  1. The skim pass: read only the abstract, ToC, section heads, and theorem statements. Is the contribution and its scale unambiguous? That is the five-minute PC read.
  2. The skeptic pass: at every "clearly," "standard," and "it follows," either write the missing sentence or verify a graduate student could.
  3. The breadth pass: find the three sentences a distributed-computing (or crypto, or quantum) PC member needs to care; make sure they exist on page 1.
  4. The consistency pass: every constant, exponent, and model detail in the abstract must match the formal statements exactly — abstract inflation is the most commonly caught overclaim.

Cycle-volatility warnings

  • The guaranteed-read geometry (and hence all page budgeting above) follows the current CFP; the window was 10 pages in earlier cycles and 12 in 2026 (待核实 each year).
  • Anonymization phrasing rules apply only in double-blind cycles; confirm the live policy before rewriting self-references.

Output format

text
[First-page verdict] theorem-forward / buried lede <- fix
[Overview quality] obstacles-and-moves / summary-only <- rewrite
[Notation audit] <symbols to cut, regimes to localize>
[Budget] <pages per role; bloat or crowding found>
[Skim-pass result] <what a 5-minute reader takes away>

© 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 STOC-Skills/skills/stoc-writing-style of brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills.

Open the folder on GitHubat commit 932eb23

Compare with similar skills

Stoc 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.

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BrandOhh-889/skyroc79513 repos~733Automated safety check: PassMIT
Khazix WeChat Article WriterKKKKhazix/khazix-skills21k1 repos~2.9kAutomated safety check: PassMIT
Writing Guidelinesvercel-labs/agent-skills32k7 repos~309Automated safety check: PassNone
Unslop AI Writing Cleanuptheclaymethod/unslop518—~1.7kAutomated safety check: PassMIT

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Categories

Questions about Stoc Writing Style

What does Stoc Writing Style do?

A skill your agent uses when drafting or revising a STOC (ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing) paper — the theorem-forward first page, informal/formal statement pairing, the technical-overview…. Stoc Writing Style is an agent skill from brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills. Use when drafting or revising a STOC (ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing) paper — the theorem-forward first page, informal/formal statement pairing, the technical-overview section that carries acceptance, notation economy for a cross-area committee, and prose that survives the twelve guaranteed pages.

When should I use Stoc Writing Style?

Stoc Writing Style fits situations like: revising a STOC (ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing) paper — the theorem-forward first page; informal/formal statement pairing; the technical-overview section that carries acceptance; notation economy for a cross-area committee.

How do I install Stoc Writing Style in Claude Code?

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

How do I install Stoc Writing Style in Codex?

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

Can I use Stoc 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 stoc-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/stoc-writing-style, .gemini/skills/stoc-writing-style, .github/skills/stoc-writing-style and .opencode/skills/stoc-writing-style in your project.

What does Stoc Writing Style need to run?

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

Does Stoc 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 Stoc 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 Stoc Writing Style use?

Stoc 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 Stoc Writing Style use?

About 1.7k tokens (SKILL.md is roughly 7k 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 Stoc Writing Style?

Skills that share tags, products or a category with Stoc Writing Style: Avoid AI Writing (conorbronsdon/avoid-ai-writing, 4.9k stars), Brand (Ohh-889/skyroc, 795 stars), Khazix WeChat Article Writer (KKKKhazix/khazix-skills, 21k stars) and Writing Guidelines (vercel-labs/agent-skills, 32k stars). The comparison table on this page puts their stars, adoption, token cost, safety result and licence side by side.

Who maintains Stoc 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.