--- 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 | Habit | Why it matters at STOC | |---|---| | Introduce notation at first use, never in a front-loaded glossary dump | Cross-area PC members drop off during page-2 symbol walls | | Prefer words for one-off concepts ("the heavy vertices") over fresh symbols | Every 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 referenced | Inline-display balance is how twelve pages stay readable | | Standard names for standard things | Renaming 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. ## 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] [Budget] [Skim-pass result] ```