Category: Essays

If you struggle to write out the introductory paragraphs of your paper – or if you’ve lost sight of whether your narrative covers the most important points – try:

The Bullet Point Method ™

For each paragraph, write out a single line – ideally formulated as a statement. 

This statement is what the whole paragraph should unpack – motivate, convey the meaning of, and provide evidence for.

The result of the exercise is a very short 4-5 bullet summary of the paper that you can easily share with your supervisor or other peers. It even helps yourself assess whether you’ve got a complete story or not.

The good thing about this method is that it is much lower effort to produce this bullet list than writing a full 500-800 word intro.

So you can treat it as a throwaway artifact. You can produce multiple different ones. 

And it’s very quick for aligning on the paper story with co-authors in a format where you do not lose sight of the narrative coherence – all while avoiding to overthink the actual flow of the sentences (like you tend to do when writing an abstract).

You can even do it together with your co-authors in a meeting. It’s fairly quick.

Have a go!

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:

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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…

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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?

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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.