Atc Writing Style

ATC Writing Style

Write for two audiences in two rounds. In round one, two reviewers read only your two-page extended abstract; in round two, 3-4 reviewers read the full paper. The abstract is review-only, not published, and must stand alone. So ATC writing has a demand no single-round venue makes: the paper's core argument must fit, self-contained, into two pages and expand faithfully into twelve.

The self-standing extended abstract (round-one surface)

A round-one reviewer who reads only the abstract should finish knowing:

1. The systems problem — a pain a builder or operator recognizes, in the first breath.
2. Why the current design is inadequate — the specific limitation your work removes.
3. The contribution — the system or technique, stated as what it does, not "novel."
4. The evidence — the real testbed and the headline result (with the metric that matters, e.g., tail latency, throughput at matched cost).
5. The honest cost — what the design trades away, named not hidden.

Test it: hand the two pages to a systems colleague without the paper and ask them to state the problem, contribution, testbed, and result. If they cannot, the abstract will lose round one no matter how strong the paper is. A trimmed introduction can work only if it already reads self-contained.

The full-paper arc

ATC papers are implementation-and-measurement narratives:

• Introduction: problem → inadequacy → contribution as systems claims → real-testbed evidence → what changes in practice. Lead with the systems contribution, not a trend sentence.
• Design: the mechanism and the reasons for each choice, tied to the deployment constraint. Reviewers reward a design justified by the problem over one justified by novelty.
• Implementation: enough that a reader believes it was built and could be rebuilt — scale (lines, components), integration points, and what was hard.
• Evaluation: questions first, then answers. End-to-end results and microbenchmarks that isolate the mechanism; baselines that are fair; tails and variance, not just means.
• Costs and limitations: report the trade beside the gain, ideally in the same figure/table. ATC reviewers trust evaluations that volunteer their costs.

Report costs beside gains (the ATC trust move)

Every systems design trades something — CPU on the fast path, memory, write amplification, warm-up, compatibility. The fastest way to earn a systems reviewer's trust is to quantify the cost in the same breath as the win, at a matched operating point (same budget, same load). Concealing the cost is the fastest way to lose it.

Page-budget discipline (two columns, 12 pages)

• ≤ 12 pages full / ≤ 6 short, excluding references and appendices, in two-column 10pt. The two-column format is denser than single-column ACM layouts — a figure-heavy systems paper fills it fast.
• Recover space editorially, never by shrinking the font or margins (a desk-reject ground): cut redundant background, merge overlapping figures, and move non-decision-critical detail to an appendix (reviewers are not required to read appendices — see atc-supplementary).
• Keep every claim that decides acceptance inside the body; the appendix and artifact hold support, not load-bearing evidence.

Systems-prose specifics

• Name the testbed early — hardware (CPU/NIC/SSD models), OS/kernel versions, and workloads — so results are legible.
• Quantify, don't adjective — "reduces p99 by X at matched throughput" beats "significantly faster."
• Third-person self-citation for double-blind — never "our earlier system X"; write it as prior work by others.
• Figures earn their space — each should answer an evaluation question a reviewer would ask.

Anti-patterns (ATC-specific)

• A dependent extended abstract that only makes sense after reading the paper — a round-one loss.
• Average-only evaluation with no tail or variance — reads as hiding the interesting cases.
• Novelty-as-argument — asserting "novel" instead of motivating the design from the problem.
• Costs quarantined in a late limitations paragraph instead of reported with the gains.
• Template tampering to fit the page budget — recover space by cutting, not shrinking.

Output format

[Extended abstract] self-standing? problem/contribution/testbed/result/cost all present in 2 pages? yes/no
[Arc] problem -> inadequacy -> contribution -> real-testbed evidence -> what changes: complete? gaps?
[Evidence shape] end-to-end + microbenchmarks? tails + variance? fair baselines? costs beside gains?
[Budget] pages used (body/refs), two-column compliance, editorial cuts available
[Rewrite queue] <ordered edits, highest-leverage first — usually the abstract>

Source: brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills → ATC-Skills/skills/atc-writing-style/SKILL.md