CHI Writing Style

A CHI paper is read by a jury that rarely shares one methodological culture: a quantitative experimenter, a design researcher, and an ethnographer may all review the same submission. The prose must therefore do explicit work that a single-culture venue lets authors skip — naming the contribution type, justifying the method choice to outsiders, and calibrating claims to human evidence. And because CHI reviews length against contribution ("papers should be commensurate with their contribution"; 5,000–8,000 words encouraged, per the CHI 2027 Papers page, read 2026-07-08), every paragraph is auditable: does this paragraph earn its words?

The contribution statement is load-bearing

CHI convention puts an explicit contribution list at the end of the introduction. Write it first, keep it honest, and let it govern the paper: