“You can’t just write the whole paper and revise it. You’ve gotta focus on small pieces or small chunks that you can revise easily and then expand out as you go.” - Jim Wallace
Your postdoc just sent you another draft. You open it with hope. Two pages in, you’re rewriting entire sections. Seven pages in, you’ve realized you’ll spend your weekend doing what they should have done in the first place.
This isn’t a people problem. It’s a simple process problem.
I just posted this conversation with Jim Wallace, an associate professor who’s been behind the curtain as a CHI Associate Chair for years. He shared a writing method so simple that you will want to test it with your own lab. The results for him? Draft quality jumped. His editing time dropped by half. And his team finally stopped staring at blank pages like they were waiting for divine intervention.
Here’s what he told me, and why it matters for your lab, too.
Twenty years ago, you could submit almost anything to CHI and get it published. Today, reviewers reject papers for missing power analyses, inadequate methods justification, and structural problems that should have been caught before submission.
The rigour increased. It’s clear. It’s simple. It’s generally good. But here’s the part that breaks labs: students and junior researchers now think reviewers exist to destroy their work. They submit defensive papers, overexplain everything, and still miss the core argument.
Wallace saw this pattern repeatedly as an AC. CHI reviewers in his view aren’t out to get people. They’re desperately trying to champion good papers. But when the structure is broken, when the argument isn’t clear, when the methods don’t match the research questions, there’s nothing to champion.
So, your team needs a method that builds champion-able papers from the start.
Stop telling your team to just start writing. That’s like telling someone to just start cooking without giving them a proper a recipe. They’ll produce something, but you’ll spend hours fixing it. Even more true in days where students draft their papers with AI. Explicit instructions are key (even for how to use AI in the process).
Wallace’s method starts with the abstract. Not some placeholder abstract. A real one.
Write one sentence for each of these:
What problem are you solving?
Who cares if you do?
What’s your solution to the problem?
What is the specific contribution of your paper? (e.g., Precisely how does your design build on existing work? or What new findings does this study provide over similar existing studies?)
Have you summarized your findings? Are take-home messages clear and meaningful?
That’s your abstract. Four to five sentences in total. If your team can’t write those sentences clearly, they don’t understand their own paper yet. Don’t let them write 8,000 words to figure it out.
Once the abstract exists, expand it. Take each sentence and grow it into a paragraph. That’s your introduction draft. Take each paragraph, relate it to the literature and expand it into more paragraphs. That’s your related work or literature review.
This forces structured thinking. Each expansion forces clarity. Each layer tests whether the argument holds.
If you spend 45 minutes on the abstract, two days later, you will likely have a complete first draft. Not a perfect draft, but a structured one you can actually edit instead of completely rewrite.
Your team thinks they need to get it right the first time. They don’t. They need to get it done, then make it right.
Wallace calls it “hard and fast iteration.” Write the abstract. Realize it’s weak. Fix it. Expand to the intro. Realize the logic doesn’t flow. Fix it. Expand to related work. Realize you’re missing key citations. Add them.
Small chunks. Fast cycles. Constant improvement.
This is how papers actually get written. Not in one beautiful, linear pass from introduction to conclusion. In messy loops that gradually sharpen the argument.
The problem is that most students iterate slowly. They write a section, wait for feedback, revise it a week later, then move to the next section. When they finish, the introduction no longer matches the conclusion. Things have gotten lost along the way.
Fast iteration means writing the abstract in the morning, expanding it to an intro by lunch, and having a rough structure by end of day. It means identifying problems immediately, when they’re still easy to fix, instead of discovering them three weeks later when you’re two days from the deadline.
Wallace built something called CHIzen, a LaTeX template that codifies good writing decisions. It includes structure prompts, visualization wrappers, checklists, and reference formatting that actually works.
You don’t need his exact template. But you will need the principles. Remove decisions that don’t matter so your team can focus on the decisions that do.
Most early-career researchers waste energy on formatting, reference styles, figure placement, and structural questions that have standard answers. They treat every paper like a blank canvas when it should be a paint-by-numbers kit with room for creativity in the right places.
Build your lab’s template based on CHIzen. Include your field’s standard structure. Add citation examples. Include your methods section boilerplate. Create a checklist of things that should be true before submission. Figures referenced in text, methods matching research questions, limitations discussed, ethics statement included.
Every decision you remove from your team is cognitive load they can spend on the actual science.
Wallace made a point that hit hard with me. Students should review papers before they write their first one. Not to critique. To calibrate. To develop taste.
When your team sees what other papers look like, when they read reviewer feedback, when they participate in the quality discussion, they internalize standards that are invisible otherwise.
I’ve assigned my PhD students to do reviews early on in their career. But they often review the lab’s papers together with me when they start, they write up their assessment, and we compare notes. The learning curve is steep. They see what good structure looks like. They spot methods problems. They learn to identify unclear arguments.
Then when they write, they pre-emptively fix problems that would have triggered reviewer concerns.
This also solves the expectation problem. Once they see that reviewers are looking for clear contributions, appropriate methods, and honest limitations, they write more confident papers themselves.
You don’t need to become a writing coach. You need to install a repeatable system.
Start every paper with an abstract workshop. Sit with your team for 30-60 minutes. Get the core sentences right. Don’t let them move forward until the abstract is solid.
Require fast iteration. Set a deadline for first draft that feels uncomfortably soon. It’s better to have a rough complete draft in a week than a polished introduction in a month.
Build your lab template. Codify your field’s expectations. Remove unnecessary decisions.
And get your junior people into review processes early. Even if it’s internal reviewing, even if it’s just reading reviews on papers you’ve received, they need to see the quality bar from the other side.
The goal is speed to acceptable paper. Because acceptable drafts become good papers through iteration. But perfect introductions attached to nothing else become abandoned projects.
Your team can write better papers. They just need a method that matches how papers actually get written, not how we pretend they get written in methods textbooks.
Start with the abstract. Expand in layers. Iterate fast. Remove unnecessary decisions.
That’s how you turn a bottleneck lab into a publishing machine.
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