micro-writing-style
Use when drafting or revising a MICRO paper's prose and structure — building the characterization-motivated introduction, budgeting 11 appendix-free pages, drawing the mechanism walkthrough a microarchitect can re-implement, and pairing every speedup claim with its area, storage, and power cost line.
Profile →npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill micro-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.
# MICRO Writing Style A MICRO paper is an engineering argument: *this pattern exists in real workloads, here is a piece of hardware that exploits it, here is what it costs, here is what it pays*. The style rules below encode how the microarchitecture community reads. ## The four-beat argument 1. **Characterization beat.** Open with measured evidence that the exploitable behavior exists — a miss-pattern histogram, a stall-cycle breakdown, a reuse-distance CDF — from real workloads, before any mechanism appears. MICRO reviewers trust a paper that observed the machine before modifying it. 2. **Insight beat.** One sentence naming the property your hardware will exploit ("dead blocks announce themselves by burst-then-silence access"). If the insight sentence could headline three different mechanisms, sharpen it. 3. **Mechanism beat.** A block diagram plus a walkthrough at the level of tables, counters, comparators, and state machines — detailed enough that a reader could size the SRAM. Include the *storage budget table* (bits per entry × entries). 4. **Accounting beat.** Speedup is half a result. The other half: area or storage overhead, power, added latency on the critical path, and wh
- The four-beat argument
- Page budget for 11 content pages, no appendix
- Sentence-level calibration
- Figure discipline
- Naming and terminology conventions
- Title and abstract conventions
- Anti-patterns the PC flags
- Revision passes, in order
- Output format
What does the micro-writing-style skill do?
Use when drafting or revising a MICRO paper's prose and structure — building the characterization-motivated introduction, budgeting 11 appendix-free pages, drawing the mechanism walkthrough a microarchitect can re-implement, and pairing every speedup claim with its area, storage, and power cost line.
How do I install it?
Run `npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill micro-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.