![]() ![]() ![]() Plain-text apps like iA Writer and Byword keep things focused on just your text. Microsoft Word is great for formatting your resume and shorter essays, as is Google Docs for writing within a team. Perhaps something that'd help break a chapter into smaller pieces, let you find every mention of a character in seconds, or hide distractions and force you to write. ![]() What would be nice, though, is a tool that makes editing your text, organizing your thoughts, and formatting your final copy into a publishable eBook or print document. All you need is a blank space to type your thoughts. You could write a book in your email drafts, Notepad, your phone's notes app, or even in SMS messages if you're desperate. I didn’t start out writing my dissertation in Scrivener, but it revolutionized my writing process when I moved my dissertation into Scrivener.You don't really need a new app to write. A small feature, but hugely beneficial to I highly recommend using Scrivener for writing a dissertation. If software always opens up to the beginning of the document, I get distracted by reviewing and editing earlier writing, rather than continuing where I left off. My other favourite feature is how it opens up to where you were last writing. For me, this “chunking” made it so much easier to develop an argument, and writing became more enjoyable. I can break large, complex things down into smaller thoughts, see the order of those thoughts in the side bar, and easily move them around. This feature alone made writing my dissertation and articles for publication so much easier. This, for me, is one of the key selling points of Scrivener. Scrivener offers a really nice way to chunk the text as you want. I’m specifically thinking of text but it could include anything else. To me the huge benefit of Scrivener is chunking. But it’s likely true that setting up compile the first time (at least for certain formats) might be a PITA. Maybe it took me awhile the first time, but now several years later all I have to do is press a keyboard combo to export all my relevant documents in one go. I think I just figured out the best way to export (for me it was multimarkdown). I don’t remember the compile feature vividly. I don’t need that feature built-in, but if it’s very useful for you then once again it’s a big reason to stay with Scrivener. But based on what you’ve written you are not in the same situation.Īnother huge benefit of Scrivener is the ability to collate research documents (research broadly speaking as a collection of PDF documents). That’s a huge time saver for me, and a huge reduction of writing friction. The beauty of markdown for me is I can do 2 things at the same time: one markdown file to create both web-ready content and PDF-ready content at the same time. So I have a certain freedom relative to other academics in terms of format of text based work. I don’t really need to worry/use MS Word. Unless you have a very good reason to move to markdown only … it seems like Scrivener is your perfect app.Īll my written work is either for the web (course websites, other kinds of websites) or as PDFs. It may not be a good fit for you, but useful to try the shoes on. Plus the Mac version can be downloaded with a 14 day trial. When I do use on iOS it’s primarily to review writing not to create more content (I pretty much hate typing on either device). At that point the price isn’t worth it for me. If I had to pay the normal price for it (instead of my university paying for it) then I’d probably switch to Numbers. On the other hand, Excel isn’t something I enjoy (I don’t hate it either) but I do use often. If it’s something I use a lot and enjoy then those are my key priorities. I’m a professional and wanted tools with little-to-no friction and that were a joy to use. ![]() I don’t think the price ever diverted me. If markdown is NOT a key feature for you then Scrivener should probably always be choice 1. The developer made “nods” toward markdown but there’s no native markdown previewing. The iOS is pretty “lame” and not worth discussing. … where I found it less than great was: (1) handling of markdown and (2) the iOS app. I think in the end it all depends on how you write and what your projects are like. ![]()
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