It’s a small time saving device, but a useful one. Instead of leaving the programme to find a synonym or search for something on Google (which will inevitably lead to looking at something not writing related), you can ask Scrivener to look things up for you. I also love the old-school camera sound effect when you click on Take Snapshot! If you want to go back to an earlier ‘draft’ you can ask Scrivener to show you your Snapshots and you can pick the one you want. You can name your Snapshots if you like, but you continue working in the same document. It takes a photograph of where you are up to at that moment. If you click Take Snapshot, Scrivener does exactly that. I soon discovered the Snapshot feature, which you can find by going to Documents>Snapshots. I went to File>Save As and saved things as ‘x article draft x ’. When I first got Scrivener, I kept up this way of saving drafts. I hate to think of the hours that I’ve wasted trying to find an old version that contains a particular quotation or turn of phrase that I’ve deleted 10 drafts later. Sometime, I have a bad day and I give it an impossible-to-find-ever-again title. Sometimes I put the date on, for a bit of variety. I have loads of Word documents marked up as ‘draft x, version x’. Sick of ‘draft 1’, ‘draft 2’, ‘final draft v3’? Me too I change them to something more appropriate later on when I’m near the final draft. With this article, I’ve got a section called “Great, but uhhhh” which is my way of saying ‘in principal this is a good idea, but I have a few issues with it’. I find it helps when you glance at that left hand side bar to have something snappy. So I can now go straight to the section on interpretivism if I like I don’t need to scroll through a long ‘power of autoethnography’ section to get to it.Īt this stage, I like to give my sections titles that mean something to me rather than use fancy academic language. You can see that I then made three sub-sections underneath. So I created a folder called ‘the power of autoethnography’. I started to write that section but found that it was getting messy and I was covering a number of issues. I then made another section for part of the article which focusses on the power of autoethnography. On the left you can see all of the sections which make up that article. It’s about the ethical issues associated with autoethnography. This is an article I’m writing at the moment. My favourite thing about Scrivener is its core feature: chopping everything into chunks and letting you see the whole of your article at a glance. Just thinking about the never ending scrolling gives me a headache. I cannot say I ever felt this way about Word. ![]() I get a buzz when I open up the programme. ![]() ![]() This, along with the other features I’ve listed below, makes me emotionally tied to Scrivener. “Now you’ve had a little time away, just think what you can write today!”. “You’re going to say something really clever today!”. Like an old friend, there is my (usually really badly formed) last sentence waiting there for me. But more significantly, it has caused a tangible sea-change in the way that I feel when I sit down to write. Because when I open the programme, whether at home or at work, Scrivener takes me straight to the place that I was when I last closed it down. ![]() It has made an amazing difference to the way that I write. Since then I’ve used it to write two journal articles and a book chapter. It’s been 6 months since I made the switch to Scrivener.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |