Paper Writing Skill

How This Skill Works

This skill encodes the writing methodology of the Systems and Networking Lab (SNL) at UC Santa Barbara, derived from forensic analysis of 6 papers (8 submissions), 7,600+ Overleaf edits, 100+ tex file versions, and 5 peer review processes. See The Paper Behind the Paper for the full analysis. It works out of the box — the default rules are calibrated and battle-tested.

Three Layers

1. The pipeline (fixed): A five-stage writing workflow. Does not change between users or papers.

2. The voice and editorial rules (defaults provided, customizable): Sentence-level style, structural rules, compression patterns, section checklists. These ship with the SNL lab's rules as defaults. Students may customize by editing files in author_profile/ — see the README for what to change.

3. The project context (per paper): Identity sentence, venue, contribution claims, locked decisions. Lives in a project_context.md in the paper's working directory.

How This Skill Connects to the Research Pipeline

This skill does not operate in isolation. It is part of a three-skill family, and the artifacts from the other two skills are direct inputs to the writing process: