Don’t skip the paper writing until the last two weeks before CHI. Because writing is thinking. You should develop the intellectual idea as you do the research – and writing is the best tool to do this.
Here’s some of the tips I’ve found most useful to get started writing – focusing on the paper framing, problem-setting, outlining, and introduction:
1. Identify your key idea and don’t wait to write
Simon Peyton (inventor of Haskell, formerly at Microsoft) is a brilliant communicator and has this excellent talk:
How to Write a Great Research Paper
And his first point is pretty much what I said in the opening. Get started writing. And this process even helps, not just to identify the key idea, but to more clearly articulate it so that it becomes relevant and interesting to the reader.
What is your key idea? If you only had one sentence…
2. Create instability/tension for the reader
This youtube lecture by Lary McEnerny from UChicago is such a gold mine of academic writing advice!
LEADERSHIP LAB: The Craft of Writing Effectively
The most important advice in it is: to create value for the reader, you have to really make the problem relevant and interesting to them. And you do this by creating tension for the reader.
Who is your target reader? What is the value for them? Where is the tension in your paper that creates this value?
3. Structure the introduction
When working out the framing for your paper, it is very helpful to start outlining or writing the introduction. There’s kind of a formula to this. A great way to think about it is that you have around four to five paragraphs, and each paragraph serves a distinct purpose.
Many people have written about this, but here is Niklas’ short essay on it, which sums it up quite nicely:
Niklas Emqvist: The Five (or Four) Paragraphs of a Successful Introduction
What does your four/five paragraphs look like? Sketch them out. Outline them. What is each paragraph trying to do? Is one paragraph trying to make two different points? Well, then split it up.