colm-writing-style
Use when drafting or revising COLM paper prose — leading with a finding about language models rather than a leaderboard delta, scoping claims to tested models and scales, naming versions in text, keeping the 9-page main text self-sufficient, and matching the measured, analysis-forward voice of COLM's award lineage.
Profile →npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill colm-writing-style --agent claude-code
Same command for any agent — swap --agent for codex, cursor, copilot.
Weekly change comes from our own snapshots, not the repository page — it measures attention, not adoption.
# COLM Writing Style COLM prose has a recognizable register, visible in the venue's Outstanding Papers: it reads like measurement, not marketing. The model under study is named precisely, the claim is scoped to what was tested, and the interesting sentence is about *what was learned*, not *who is winning*. Edit toward that register. ## Lead with the finding, not the delta The weakest COLM opening is "LLMs have shown impressive capabilities, but..." — a frame that positions the paper as a reaction to hype. The strongest openings state the phenomenon or question directly: - *Delta-first (avoid):* "We improve long-context QA by 4.2 points over strong baselines." - *Finding-first (prefer):* "Accuracy on items written before a model's data cutoff exceeds accuracy on items written after it — the gap, not the score, is what a static leaderboard measures." If the paper's most interesting sentence is a number on a benchmark, the framing is not done; find the sentence about language models that the number supports. ## Scope discipline: the "for the models tested" rule Unscoped generalization is the most common COLM prose bug. Claims about "LLMs" must either carry coverage (multiple families,
- Lead with the finding, not the delta
- Scope discipline: the "for the models tested" rule
- The 9-page architecture
- Voice calibration
- Limitations as evidence of competence
- Titles and abstracts, COLM register
- Revision passes, in order
- Output format
What does the colm-writing-style skill do?
Use when drafting or revising COLM paper prose — leading with a finding about language models rather than a leaderboard delta, scoping claims to tested models and scales, naming versions in text, keeping the 9-page main text self-sufficient, and matching the measured, analysis-forward voice of COLM's award lineage.
How do I install it?
Run `npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill colm-writing-style --agent claude-code` — it drops the skill into your project so the agent can pick it up. Swap the --agent value for codex, cursor or copilot if you use one of those.
Where does this skill come from?
From brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills, a repository with 909 stars. We read it straight from the repository tree rather than a submitted listing, so what you see here is what is actually published.
Is a popular skill a good skill?
Not necessarily. Stars measure attention, not adoption — a repository can trend for a week and be abandoned. That is why we show the weekly change from our own snapshots next to the total, instead of a single flattering number.