The part of my experiments of organizing and restructuring things has been exploring new software. My latest discover has been a new word processing software, Scrivener. This software is available for Mac, Windows, and Linux OSs.

When looking for software to ease dissertation writing, I stumbled upon Scrivener. So far, I really enjoy it as an alternative to Word or Pages (the Mac equivalent). I type my notes for class and consequentially, I either end up with a lot of Word documents or a never-ending, scrolling Word document that is cumbersome to use. Scrivener creates “projects” where I can easily organize my notes and label the contents of the subfile.

In the screenshot below, I have notes that I’ve taken. Each index card can be labeled so the contents of each page are clear. I can either click on the files under “Draft” to access each file or click on the corkboard. This feature is already pretty nice for organizing schoolnotes; this will probably be a time saver for dissertation notes.

A screenshot of the Scrivener Corkboard. These index cards can be clicked on and will take you to my notes for that day.

In terms of actually typing in the document, it’s similar to Word for me. Some key features a friend has noted enjoying is being able to enter a full screen mode that blacks out everything but the page you are writing. That’s handy for those who get easily distracted.

I haven’t even unpacked all of Scrivener’s features, but I’m already impressed and very much considering a conversion to Scrivener. Some particular features I’m eager to try are the exporting functions. Besides Word, Scrivener can export to LaTeX, which is typesetting software. Although I am not obligated to use LaTeX for my dissertation, LaTeX has some valuable features (namely, with figures) and produces professional, good-looking documents. I plan on using it. Exporting to LaTeX is not trivial, and I have had friends tell me that the formatting becomes messy if you type in Word and copy-paste into a the LaTeX compiler. If Scrivener can really create LaTeX files, particularly with maintaining the formatting, I’ll be really sold. Right now, for a $45 piece of software, I’m already quite impressed.

There is a learning curve, but it isn’t too extreme. In any case, the creators of Scrivener offer a very generous free trial; you receive 30 days of actual use, meaning that if you only use Scrivener once every week, you can use it for 30 weeks. I think this software has multiple uses beyond academic; I could see it being very handy for organizing dance notes, choreographing, etc.

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