Once you finish first draft of your rebuttal, you will easily find that the length is beyond the text limit. You want to answer all the questions by the reviewers, but the space is often limited. (for CHI, only 5,000 characters)
There are a number of tips by great HCI researchers about writing good rebuttals. You can refer them to prepare your rebuttal. If you don't have much experience in rebuttal, it's always good to read it before rebuttal period to save time.
- Writing Rebuttals by Niklas Elmqvist
- Writing CHI Rebuttals by Gene Golovchinsky
- SIGCHI Rebuttals: Some Suggestions How to Write Them by Albrecht Schmidt
- A CHI Rebuttal by Simone O’Callaghan
- How to Write SIGCHI Rebuttals by Hyunyoung Song
As a PhD student, I don't have such great tips, but I can share tips to shorten your rebuttal, which actually helped me write CHI rebuttal last year. Some of them are somewhat dirty, but useful.
For the record, I learned most of them from my colleague, Huy Viet Le.
- Passive tense --> active tense
- For instance, --> e.g.,
- In other words, --> i.e.,
- Previous work --> prior work
- #AC --> #R
- And, but --> ;
- did not --> didn't or didnt. Use it at most once, only when you are desperate.
- Cut a long sentence into two sentences. It can save space for connecting terms such as which, that, etc.
- Make abbreviation e.g., KnobSlider -> KS
Randomly remove space that is not notable. E.g., We will add suggested statistic analysis. (R1, R4) -> We will add suggested statistic analysis.(R1,R4)Update 19/11/2019: Thibault in my office said that the precision does not count blanks or new lines as characters.
Keep in mind that your writing is academically qualified. I put additional links that give you more tips.
https://eastasiastudent.net/study/reduce-word-count/
http://www.editage.com/insights/10-tips-to-reduce-the-length-of-your-research-paper
http://theexpatfreelancer.blogspot.de/2011/09/word-count-limit-got-you-down-try-these.html
http://accentuateservices.com/archives/1367