3/30/13 Scrivener — A perfect program for dissertation writing | ORGANIZING CREATIVITY

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Scrivener — A perfect program for dissertationwriting

3/30/13 Scrivener — A perfect program for dissertation writing | ORGANIZING CREATIVITY

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Synopsis: Describing my favorite writing program — Scrivener — and itsstrengths for writing of longer academic texts.

I have already recommended Scrivener in the references of “Organizing Creativity”, but writing my dissertationthesis with it has led me to recommend it once more: It is simply an awesome, awesome, really awesome

program. Note: It’s now available as Version 2.x and still the best tool I know for writing (and the posting is still

up-to-date).

No kidding — I wrote “Organizing Creativity” with it, which was over 400 pages long, had 138.105 words and

785.500 characters, and it was still very easy to find the thread or specific spots where I wanted to changesomething. Now my dissertation thesis has 45.531 words and 288.429 characters and still isn’t finished — and Ijust cannot cope with the love for this program.

Granted, without Circus Ponies Notebook I would not have been able to write my dissertation, it helped me somuch organizing all the material, all the literature, and all the countless results and statistical analysis, but when itcomes to actual writing, Scrivener is just the reigning and undefeated champion.

First, let’s give a quick overview of what Scrivener looks like:

3/30/13 Scrivener — A perfect program for dissertation writing | ORGANIZING CREATIVITY

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The typical interface of Scrivener. Very organized and a pleasure to use.

With Scrivener’s usual layout you have the Binder on the left side which shows your document structure, the

index card for the synopsis, the status information, and the document or project notes on the right side, and thespace to write the actual text in the middle. Seems no different than Microsoft Word or any other text processingprogram? Read right on …

I’d like to stress a few of the great functions of Scrivener for thesis writing:

Organization

Binder

You know the “Outline View” in Word? That shows you the structure of your document even if

it handles the text as one continuing flow of words? Scrivener has the “Binder” which can be used to create a

rough outline of the document, for example: Introduction, Theoretical Background, Research Questions,Method, Results, Discussion, Conclusion, for an article with several text documents under each outline header.

Or a more complicated structure for a dissertation (see image). While it may sound strange to divide the

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document into these “tiny” parts, it actually makes sense. You can switch quickly between the different parts.

Got an idea for the Theoretical Background of Question Three? You can quickly add it because you can easily

jump to that part. No more need to scroll through long text. You can also easily collapse and expand parts ofyour document, depending on where your focus is.

Index cards for Synopsis

Granted, I did not use this feature much — yet. But Scrivener offers you an index card for each

text part of your document. You can write some notes what should be in this document and what not. Nice helpto structure larger projects if you do not have Circus Ponies Notebook for this.

Document Notes and Project Notes

Technically it isn’t much, but the ability to make notes to the small parts of the document is

invaluable. Got an idea what you have to mention in the Discussion section for Question 2? Write it in the

“Document Notes” of that part. Sure, you could simply write it in the text itself, marked as a note, but it gets

confusing fast. Got something that you want to have available everywhere in the document? Write it in the“Project Notes” (visible if you click on “Document Notes” and change the view to “Project Notes” — you can

access it anywhere in the document.

Easy Version Control (Snapshots)

You are going to do a major revision of the paragraph you are working on or just delete that special sentence

that might be useful once again. Instead of creating a new version of the document (and wondering in which

version the golden sentence is days later), you can simply create a snapshot of the part you are working on.

Snapshots are like versions in a Wiki and they come in two … well, versions: untitled and with a title you canenter. Use the title version, for example, “changed the baseline of the results to the visitors who actually used the

device”, and you know what changed between the versions you have save. If you want to roll back to a previous

version or simply get that golden sentence later you can do so easily. Since writing is actually more rewriting, this

features is invaluable.

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Much, much better than the version control of any other writing program — Scrivener letsyou quickly create backups of your texts. Great for rewriting — you can always seen and

compare what you had written here previously.

Split View

Yes, Word can compare different parts of the same file. Scrivener can so too, and offers horizontal and vertical

view of the parts of the document. Since the document is subdivided into smaller parts you can easily compare a

part of the introduction with a part of the discussion. Making references to different parts of the document has

never been so easy.

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Much better than the split view in word. Scrivener just let’s you concentrate on what you

write.

Status Information (and Outline View)

It feels good to finish a part of a longer text and leave it behind. Scrivener offers to give a status to different parts

of the Scrivener file, so I routinely give the corresponding status to the parts I have finished: “To Do”, “First

Draft”, “Revised Draft”, “Final Draft”, “Done” — you might even create your own names. While it might soundstrange to use this feature, you can get a quick overview over your file with the outline view and quickly see

where you are with the document — and it is just a good feeling to assign a “First Draft” to a part you struggled

with for hours and hours.

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outline-view.png

This view let’s you see the status of the different parts of your writing project. Very powerful.

Statistics

Just where are you with your document? Word offers “word count” — Scrivener offers “Project Statistics”,

“Text Statistics”, and “Project Targets”. “Project Statistics” gives you the amount of words, characters, and the

amount of pages the text takes (according to your specified characteristics). “Text statistics” does the same with

the part you are currently working on. “Project Targets” lets you set the number of words (or characters) you

want to write and shows you how far you are from reaching that goal. You can also set session goals for the

amount of words (or characters) you want to write today. It’s nice to have some kind of feedback this way.

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The text statistics are actually very useful.

Security

Auto-Save … every two(!) seconds

Sure, Microsoft Word can autosave a document, but it saves the whole document which takes

time (yes, even a second adds up and interrupts your workflow, something that Microsoft does very well,

unfortunately). Scrivener divides the document small instances which it autosaves every two seconds —unnoticeable and secure. If you have ever written a good sentence that you couldn’t remember a few seconds

later if you hadn’t written it down, you will appreciate this feature. It let’s you focus on writing, not on securing

what you have written.

Note: Nevertheless, always make sure you backup your files to another hard drive. When the hard drive goes, it

take everything with it, which includes different files saved on different partitions if they are on the same physical

medium (analogy: if Earth goes up in smoke, it doesn’t matter whether you are in France or Spain). Scrivener isvery good, but it still works in a world that can fail (note: the world, not Scrivener). And Scrivener makes

3/30/13 Scrivener — A perfect program for dissertation writing | ORGANIZING CREATIVITY

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backups very easy … by “Backup Project to” … read on.

Backup Project to

I strongly recommend using incremental saves with Word. This means saving occasionally not with the same file

name but with a file name somewhat like this: Dissertation_20090805_1.doc, Dissertation_20090805_2.doc,Dissertation_20090805_3.doc, Dissertation_20090806_1.doc, etc. Sounds tedious — it is. But it is the only

way to recover your work when (not “if”) Word crashes and takes your work with it. It happens, I have seen it

happen, and it is not pretty. Trying to reconstruct your work of weeks from a crashed and inoperable Word file

is an experience I do not wish anybody (but some special somebodies >:->). Scrivener offers “Backup Project

To …”, which creates a .zip-file with the current file packed in it (Scrivener files are actually directories that are

handled as files). It doesn’t get better or more convenient than this, especially if you consider the default file

name, it is: “NAME [DATE_TIME].zip”. So for example a Scrivener file called Diss.scriv gets backups on the25th of August 2009 at 19:14 as “Diss [25_08_09_19_14].zip”. How easy can it get to make occasional

backups you can refer to when the shit really hits the fan?

If your writing is gone, it will never come back. Scrivener let’s you easily and quickly create

backup files — compressed if you want to, with automatically naming the file according to the

current date and time!

Simplicity without being simple

Mimize Space

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The Inspector (showing you the index card, general information, and document/project notes) and the Binder

(showing you the document structure) can be hidden easily — the icons to do so are on the tool bar. This

essentially reduces Scrivener’s appearance to a simply text editor which does not take up much space, ideally to

place it next to SPSS or R to write down the statistical results or next to Circus Ponies Notebook to write the

text according the outline displayed there. Of course, it only looks simple, it is actually very, very powerful …

You can minimize the interface to a bare-bones text editor.

Annotations

Sometimes you just have to write notes to yourself: “Check these values”, “Can you really do

this this way?”, “Remember to mention this in the discussion”. Scrivener has an easy annotation tool that lets you

write your annotations into the text but marked in red. They will not appear on your exported drafts but they will

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nevertheless be available for you when you review the file.

Focus on the writing, not formatting or anything else

Text not Pages is the central unit

Word does use the page as central metaphor. Yes, there is a view that shows the text without showing thepages, but still, it is the central unit. When you open a Word document, you open it with a specific format, e.g.,

DIN A4 in Germany, Letter in America, etc. Word handles the words according to that format. Scrivener is not

interested in the paper format. It handles text. It shows you what you have written. You can make paragraphs or

not, waste space or save it, it doesn’t care where one page would end and the other one begins. While it may

sound crazy not to take the pages into account (after all, who wants a single line of a section on the beginning of

a page) it actually makes sense. The formatting bit comes later, when you have written your text. Unless you are

really into design (like in Poems and Calligraphy) you do not need to know where the page ends until you have

written the text. You can focus on the words and not on any artificial space units when you write something. Ifyou show a little discipline and do not write too much, this is a great benefit. Scrivener lets you focus on the

important part, the content, and saves the formatting for later.

Note: Yes, it can do “bold”, “italics”, “highlighting”, “lists”, etc. — but you will notice that it will not matter to you

as much as in Word. When you focus on the content the layout becomes secondary.

Full Screen Writing

It is hard to fully focus on the words you want to write. There is always something going on, most of it on your

Desktop. The mp3 app shows the current title (and animates it), the Dock shows a new mail, and Skype

suddenly opens with another instant interruption message. Scrivener offers a Full Screen Writing Mode. It

completely or partially darkens everything on the screen that is not part of your text and allows you to focus on

your writing. Except disconnecting the internet, it doesn’t get better than this. Some features like the width of thedocument included.

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The fullscreen writing mode … great if you want to concentrate on the text. Note that youhave to disable typewriter scrolling (the current line of the text jumping to the vertical middle)here separately from the normal view.

Compile draft

When it is time to create the document, Scrivener lets you export the text easily as .rtf. You cansimply indicate what to include, what to leave out, when to make a page break — and much more, if you want

to. It offers huge choices when it comes to the formatting of the export, but, and this is a huge strength ofScrivener, it won’t ask you about it until you want to export your text. Until that point it lets you focus on the

text. Uninterrupted by formatting decisions.

Configure the necessary things, not everything

Word’s tool bar(s) can be configured beyond actual usability. Scrivener, as a typical Appleproduct, offers you the necessary things — not more. Most of the time, it is enough … and lets you write in

peace.

It is fast!

One of the things that turn me off Microsoft Word (besides the screen-area-wasting-and-treating-us-all-like-

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drug-addict-shaking-hands-Mr.-Magoo’s-over-dimensionized-icons of the latest version) is the speed. Wordtakes time — if you think fast. Scrivener, however, is fast. A longer document (think 750.000+ characters) might

take some seconds (not minutes!) to open or to count the words and characters, but once it is open it is just sodamn quick. It really, really bugs me to wait for a computer. Scrivener never lets me wait, it is just as quick as Iexpect a good software to be.

It is cheap!

Scrivener is a commercial program with a 30-day trial — and the price is only 29.79 EUR or $39.95. BesidesCircus Ponies Notebook Scrivener is one of the few programs that really, really were worth the amount ofmoney I spend for it. Taken the about a million words I have easily written with it, a word did cost me 0.002979

Cent (Euro-Cent). And it gets cheaper and cheaper.

And much, much more

This is only a small overview of the functions of Scrivener that are useful for thesis writing. Scrivener offer much,much more (e.g., Keywords, a Research Area where you can store images and movies, a corkboard where you

can see the index cards with the synopsis or the images, etc.). It’s true strength is fiction writing (if you ever wantto write a novel, consider Scrivener) but it is also extremely powerful for scientific writing.

There are, of course, some things that are lacking, especially for scientific writing:

No integration with Reference Management Software

There is no integration with reference management software (e.g. Citavi, Reference Manager, Endnote). Because

I keep my bibliography in a Circus Ponies Notebook file, I am used to copy-pasting references into the articlemanually. However, for some this might be a drawback. It helps to highlight cited literature in the Scrivener files— it does not offer a Multindex like Circus Ponies Notebook does, but it is useful none-the-less.

Note: Anders Gerdmar send me a workable way to use Endnote with Scrivener — citing his eMail:

Go from Scriv to Endnote using the keyboard short-cut shift-cmd-Y (in preferences you

choose to which reference software that you are connecting to)

Mark the work you want to include and copy

Back in Scriv, paste where you want the bibliographic info. It then places an Endnote tagthere, e.g., {Althaus, 1939 #2929}.

When ready with your diss in Scriv, the tags are of course included in the rtf and if yu open itin Word, you can use its dynamic feature to format the foot- or endnotes and get a perfect

bibliography according to the style you have chosen, e.g., (Althaus 1939, 55) in the text orAlthaus 1939, 55 in the footnote, and this in the bibliography: Althaus, Paul. 1939. ZumGedächtnis der abgerufenen Herausgeber der “Beiträge”. In Adolf Schlatter und Wilhelm

Lütgert zum Gedächtnis, ed. Paul Althaus, 40:1. Gütersloh: C. Bertelsmann.

Graphics have to be in the “Research” Tree or referenced with textual information

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Unfortunately, Scrivener cannot put images as stand-alone elements into the Draft area, only as images onto a

text page itself [Thanks to Romeo -- see comments -- for highlighting a former ambiguity here.]. I would not useScrivener for fine-grained layout work or work with images in combination with text. But on the other hand,there is no need to. Remember that Scrivener is a program to write the text. It is not a layout program with which

you can produce finished, perfectly formatted tables, graphics, or such-a-like. You have to use a differentsoftware for this — and there, Word does have it uses, although I prefer Apple Pages — or lately, InDesign. But

actually, this is not a huge problem. Whenever I write about a Figure, Image, or Table I want to include, I createthis part in a separate Pages file and write the file name in Scrivener, mark it in orange, and forget about it. When

I create the finished version the highlighted text will remind me to simply copy-paste the figure or table at thatplace. Until then, I can concentrate on the writing. No use to use a software beyond its limits — Scrivener is for

writing text and does this excellently, not for creating layouts.

Better than LaTeX (for writing, not for layout )

A word to LaTeX users — I know that LaTex can do similar things, especially with TexNicCenter or a similar

editing software. And that you can do anything with LaTeX if you want to. A colleague uses a programmingenvironment for writing texts, after all, what is programming but writing very specialized pieces of text. But did I

mention that Scrivener is extremely easy to use? It is purely Apple in its look and feel, even if it is written bysomeone not working for Apple. You do not need a LaTeX wizard for the difficult parts. And yes, I know thereare some Shareware programs for Windows that aspire to do the same. I tried one of them, it looked and felt

like Shareware and it *asked each time whether I wanted to save the part I just changed when I wanted to jumpto a different part of the document*! Scrivener is not like that — Scrivener is easy to use, very easy to use.

Better than Word (or any Microsoft program)

This is also the reason why I prefer Scrivener to Word and other text processing softwares. You could probably

get Word to behave like Scrivener — for the most part. But it would be hard to do so. Scrivener makes all thesethings naturally and — like already said — lets you focus on the things that matter most: your words. This makesScrivener a typical Apple software. Like the Apple OS it lets you focus on your work without trying to convince

you that something else is more important (like showing you a message that the computer cannot be connected tothe Wireless Network after it has already shown you a message that the WiFi card is not switched on …

seriously, how stupid can you get?).

Summary

I had rarely so much fun writing than while using Scrivener. For “Organizing Creativity” and my dissertation thesis

it was (is) just perfect. However, great tools do not equal superior quality, so do not let the lack of perfection inmy works prevent you from using Scrivener.

In short, Scrivener was written by an author for authors and does everything to lets you focus on the mostimportant part of writing: your words. Or to use the words of a colleague: it does not occupy your brain with

extraneous cognitive load but keeps everything as simple as possible. It leaves the formatting for later with adifferent program (or as an export option) and lets you focus on the words — that takes effort enough.

Oh, by the way, it is available at http://www.literatureandlatte.com — and there is a 30-day trial. Try it, you will

probably not regret it.

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If you are interested in writing a dissertation or any longer book project, I can highly recommend reading theentry: “How to Write a Dissertation Thesis in a Month: Outlines, Outlines, Outlines“. It gives an overview of the

writing process, using Circus Ponies Notebook as a detailed outline (that contains everything you later needwhile writing). The posting Outliner in Scrivener vs Outliner in Circus Ponies Notebook — Structure (Scrivener)vs Content (CPN) Outlines shows the difference between the strengths of Scrivener vs. CPN regarding outlines.

Note: I do not give any warranty that the links or the software does work, nor will I take any warranty orresponsibility for any damages by these links or the mentioned software. Not even for the software I

recommend. Use a virus scanner, keep your firewall up, and act sensible to protect your computer.

Update

The entry is still valid (and frequently read) in 2013. However, some other postings expand the topic a little —

besides the ones mentioned above — the following two are probably helpful:

Typewriter Scrolling in Scrivener (read it if you want to use the Fullscreen modus of Scrivener)

Workshop: Scientific Work – Overview (links to a series of postings about scientific work, is currently awork in progress)

I also highly recommend having a look at the second edition of “Organizing Creativity”. It came out 2012and it has some good entries about Scrivener, working with Content Outlines, Writing a Book, and the like. Allin an easy to read package and it can be downloaded for free (donationware).

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64 Responses to Scrivener — A perfect program for dissertation writing

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1. Daniel says:

June 18, 2012 at 10:42 am

Hoi Bastian,

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