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Advanced tricks

The eight tricks are moves. These are moves that generate new moves.

Don't write a grammar — learn one

The grammars of trick 4 were reverse engineered by hand from exemplars. Skip the hand work:

1. Collect PDFs of papers you admire into one directory.
2. Start an LLM session in that directory.
3. Show it two or three sample grammars (this site's, or the paper's Figures 7–10) so it learns the notation.
4. Name a section: “describe, in this notation, the grammar of the introduction in these papers.”
5. Diff the learned grammar against the default one. Keep the productions you like; the diff itself is a finding about your taste.

The same session then writes to the grammar it just learned — so the style you admire becomes the style you draft in, without ever naming its rules yourself.

Other advanced tricks

Venue-tune the grammar. Feed the last three years of your target venue's distinguished papers instead of personal favorites. Now the grammar encodes what that program committee already rewards. (The paper flags this as the upgrade path for its area archetypes too: build each area column from distinguished papers, not from call text.)

Parse your draft; the parse errors are the todo list. Once a section has a grammar, ask the LLM to parse your draft against it: which leaves are present, which are missing, which appear out of order? A missing [naive_fails] is a sharper review comment than “the motivation is weak.”

Learn the anti-grammar. Trick 5's banned-word linter was written by hand. Instead: collect slop (LLM drafts you rejected, padded blog prose) and ask what productions distinguish it from the keepers. The ban list becomes learned, refreshable, and yours.

Grid a would-be collaborator. Before inviting a co-author, add their column to the FOCUS grid. Do they cluster with the team, adding nothing new — or do they land on the priced blind spot? Recruit for the empty column, not the crowded one.

paper[0] as pre-registration. The loop's rule — if title, abstract, and elevator cannot be written, return to problem selection — is a cheap pre-registration gate. Write the claim first, with bracketed placeholder numbers; the brackets are a public list of exactly what the experiments still owe.

Grammars for the other genres. Nothing limits this to papers. Proposals already have a folk grammar (the Heilmeier catechism); rebuttals, theses, and registered reports each have exemplars to learn from. Same five steps as above, different PDF directory.

Combines with: 4 — write to a grammar supplies the notation; 6 — assemble critics runs the parse-as-review; 7 — pause and reflect: every learned grammar still gets a human read before it drives a draft.

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