focs-writing-style

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:

| Pages | Content | Failure mode it prevents |

|---|---|---|

| 1–1.5 | Problem, headline theorem(s) informally, why they matter | Reviewer cannot state your result after page 2 |

| 1.5–3 | Context: prior bounds, the obstacle, your delta stated precisely | "Novelty unclear" from a non-specialist |

| 3–6 | Technical overview: the proof's actual ideas, with real definitions | "Contribution may be incremental" — ideas were invisible |

| 6–9.5 | Formal statements of all results; proof of one representative lemma in full | Committee cannot check that formality matches the informal claims |

| 9.5–10 | Organization note pointing into the body | Diligent 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:

% 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.

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.

1. Quantifier audit: every informal statement checked against its restatable

twin.

1. Confession audit: grep the LaTeX for hedge phrases and discharge each.
2. Blind audit: third-person self-references, metadata, acknowledgements.

Do the passes in that order — narrative surgery invalidates later audits, so

anonymity always goes last.