Chapters

The guide, one chapter per file. Read in order if you have time; jump around if you are on a deadline (see the tracks on the home page).

#	Chapter	What it covers
1	The NLP Publication Landscape	Where you'll submit: conferences, journals, workshops, ARR, shared tasks
2	What Kind of Paper Are You Writing?	Long, short, Findings, resource, survey, position, demo, industry, shared task
3	Decoding the Jargon	The words nobody defines for you: review-speak, named failure modes, NLP memes
4	Before You Write	The four questions you must answer before opening Overleaf
5	Working With Advisors and Co-authors	Authorship, author order, CRediT, advisor relationships, feedback, co-writing logistics
6	Writing Clearly	Sentence-level craft for non-native authors: tense, articles, hedging, clutter, flow
7	Figures and Tables That Work	Vector graphics, accessible color, plots, architecture diagrams, booktabs — and the tools
8	The Title	The only part most of the field will read
9	The Abstract	The five-move abstract; 150–250 words; written last
10	The Introduction	The classic five-paragraph *ACL intro; the contributions list
11	Related Work	Not a literature review — an argument
12	Background / Preliminaries	When you need one, when you don't
13	Dataset Construction	For resource papers: source, languages, annotation, agreement, statistics
14	Methods	The section new authors most often over-write and under-explain
15	Experimental Setup	How reviewers decide whether to believe your results
16	Results	Not "here are our numbers" — "here is what they mean"
17	Analysis and Discussion	Where you earn the reader's trust
18	Conclusion	Short. Five sentences is plenty
19	Limitations (Required)	The Confessional, the Dismissal, the Reflection
20	Ethical Considerations	Be specific, not performative
21	Using AI Tools Responsibly	What the ACL policy allows, what to disclose, and the hallucinated-citation trap
22	References & Appendices	Including the recent hallucinated-citations problem
23	The Rebuttal	Responding to reviews: triage, structure, tone, and a worked example
24	How to Review Well	The other chair: duties, scores, invalid reasons to reject, and a worked example
25	After Rejection	Reading reviews, revise vs. redirect vs. rethink, and how ARR resubmission works
26	After Acceptance	Camera-ready, honoring rebuttal promises, the poster and the talk, getting read
27	Best Papers Worth Reading	A reading list with purpose
28	A Final Checklist	Print this. Tape it above your desk