Systems Paper Writing: Paragraph-Level Structural Blueprint

Fine-grained structural guidance for writing 10, 12 page systems papers targeting top systems venues: OSDI, SOSP, ASPLOS, NSDI, and EuroSys. This skill provides page allocation per section, paragraph-level blueprints, and writing patterns distilled from authoritative guides and best-paper analysis.

When to Use This Skill

Scenario	Use This Skill	Use ml-paper-writing Instead
Structuring a 12-page OSDI/SOSP paper	✅
Page budget and paragraph planning	✅
Systems-specific evaluation structure	✅
General ML paper writing philosophy		✅
Citation verification workflow		✅
LaTeX templates and formatting		✅
NeurIPS/ICML/ICLR paper structure		✅

Boundary: ml-paper-writing provides general writing philosophy, multi-venue templates, and citation verification. This skill focuses exclusively on paragraph-level structural blueprints for systems conferences.

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Authoritative Sources

This blueprint synthesizes guidance from established systems researchers:

1. Levin & Redell, "How (and How Not) to Write a Good Systems Paper" (SOSP'83 PC Chairs, USENIX/ACM SIGOPS)
2. Irene Zhang (MSR/UW), "Hints on how to write an SOSP paper" (SOSP/OSDI PC)
3. Gernot Heiser (UNSW, seL4), Style Guide + Paper Writing Talk
4. Timothy Roscoe (ETH Zürich), "Writing reviews for systems conferences"
5. Mike Dahlin (UT Austin/Google), "Giving a Conference Talk"
6. Yi Ding, "How to write good systems papers?"
7. hzwer & DingXiaoH, WritingAIPaper (GitHub 1.3k+ stars)

Full citations and URLs: see references/section-blueprints.md.

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12-Page Systems Paper Blueprint

Overview: Page Allocation