As I begin to organize writing for my dissertation, I am trying out a writing application called Scrivener. I have several colleagues who swear by it, and a few others who, like me, are trying it out for the first time. I find that writing long documents like, ahem, dissertations is mainly a task of organization. I run into problems with Word where I am scrolling into oblivion and can’t make sense of the totality of my document. This, of course, leads to depression and a lot of washing dishes. The benefit of Scrivener seems to be that it allows you to storyboard your ideas and even separate them out visually onto “note cards” that you can then move around. Right now I seem to be using Scrivener in a hybrid way, visualizing and outlining my work there and working back and forth in my Word document.
So, we’ll see how it goes. Feel free to comment here if you use Scrivener: how do YOU use it and is it helping cut through the scrolling oblivion of Word?
Miriam E. Sweeney 