I’m one of those people who don’t mind spending a few days becoming familiar with a new piece of software or a new method. Although it can sometimes be exhausting, I hardly ever regret it and mostly end up enjoying it. In the case of Scrivener, it has practically changed my (writing) life. I don’t want to be hyperbolic here, but as a very structured person, I finally found something that actually speaks to the way I think about my text.
I can’t say if less organised (read: less pedantic) people will take to Scrivener the same way I have, but I suspect it might also help the less organised among us.
This is not a guide on how to set up Scrivener (there are plenty of good one’s out there – I’ll make sure to link some of them below), but rather an attempt at helping you make the choice to try out Scrivener.
I want to say before I go further: If you are only writing smaller projects of around 10-20 pages that can mostly be contained within one document, Scrivener might not be for you. But if you’re writing – or planning on writing – a larger work, I think you’ll find it worth considering.
Most often, Scrivener is marketed as a tool for screenwriters or other writers of fiction. I’m sure it is a really good tool for that. But what I want to advocate here is using Scrivener for academic writing. Or at least thinking about why we always use Word although it is not very good at it’s job.
“This is not a guide on how to set up Scrivener”
It wasn’t until I was halfway into my PhD that I came across this piece of software, I think through reading other academic writer’s blogs. Maybe it was The Thesis Wisperer (highly recommend!). The Scrivener logo looks a little dated, and the website (www.literatureandlatte.com) initially made me a little suspicious. But since they have a free trial, what was there to lose, apart from precious time. Another great thing about this programme is that once you decide to buy it, it’s a one-time cost and it’s not expensive (the current price is 499 DKK, or around $70).
Design
I will admit, I had to get used to the design. Aesthetically, there’s a little too much going on for me. But once you get to know the features, you realise that you actually need all of those buttons and windows.
One thing that really changed my way of writing and thinking about my writing is the left pane which hold all your documents. The layout of the pane lets you see how your documents are related, and if you realise that a piece of text is better suited for another chapter, you can just drag an drop it there. This view of the structure of the project really helps me think about how the different parts of my thesis are related, and also highlights where I am in the project. Plus, if I remember some small thing I want to add to another text than the one I’m currently working on, I can easily go to that text and back to my original document without searching through a long list of documents in a folder.
I have my main Scrivener folder in a folder on my computer which backs up to an online service, and so, I know that I always have a backup of all of my work.
Apart from the main folders of the text there are also Back matter and Front matter sections, as well as Research and Ideas sections. And you can add whichever section you want and decide which ones should be included when you compile your project.
One thing that’s good to know is that Scrivener comes with several different templates, and there’s a whole section of non-fiction formats to choose from when you start a new project. I think I started out with the General Non-Fiction template and worked from there. You can also find templates online and load them into Scrivener.
Better than LaTeX?
Starting my thesis, I thought I was gonna be one of those humanities people who use LaTeX (linguistics is the math of humanities, after all). I liked the way LaTeX works, the beautiful and highly controllable output it gives, and (most of) the processes seemed intuitive to me. But using it, it’s also clear that it’s made for mathematics, and unless you’re writing a lot of equations or other mathy things, I will argue that Scrivener can meet your needs and save you time. To be fair to LaTex, like most programming languages it’s not really meant for text production, as in actually getting the words on the page, but is made for formatting. I used the online LaTeX platform Overleaf which is very user friendly. I highly recommend it if you want to go the LaTeX way. When it comes to keeping your thought and bits of text in order, though, I find Scrivener superior.
If you want to write in Scrivener and compile in LaTeX, Scrivener also has templates for that, and you can find good tutorials online for how to integrate the two.
Definitely better than Word
While it might not make sense to compare LaTeX and Scrivener, I will gladly come out and say that Scrivener is better than Microsoft Word. As academics we seem to have accepted Word as the go to option for writing, which, I will argue, is really selling ourselves short. With Word, I think we’re adapting to what it can do instead of chosing a writing tool that does what we need it to. Word is terrible at formatting, does not have good outlining features, and requires a lot of handholding. At the same time, you’ll probably need to work in many different Word documents, which is not a fault of Word’s but does not help your workflow. In Scrivener, you can easily see two documents at a time, and once your formatting is set, Scrivener does the work and outputs a streamlined document without random line breaks or uneven spacing. And it does so in useful formats, including MultiMarkdown, pdf, rtf, OpenOffice and html.
“With Word, I think we’re adapting to what it can do instead of choosing a writing tool that does what we need it to.“
A few of my favourite features
Now that I’ve told you why you should try Scrivener, I want to share a few of my favourite features. This will hopefully help show what a powerful writing and thinking tool Scrivener is.
Writing
A feature I use a lot – probably too much – is setting targets. When you’re writing a large(r) project, such as a PhD thesis, you probably have a lot of different documents to keep track of, and how do you know where you are in the process? I’ve used Scrivener’s writing targets in different ways. It has the nifty feature of automatically calculating how much you need to write everyday to reach your deadline. You can choose how many days it should include in this calculation. For instance, I started out with Monday-Thursday as writing days. This gave me a litte leeway: if I didn’t write my quota for the week, I could catch some of it on Friday (and sometimes on weekends).
When I hadn’t reached my targets for a while and started to see the ticker just go up and up, it stopped helping and started stressing me out. So now, I’ve set the goal of a 1000 words per day, as you can see in the screenshot above (on the right). I’ve also set a max goal of 100.000 words, which is the limit for PhD theses at my faculty. In this way, I now view it as a limit which I should definitely aim toward, but not as a goal to reach.
Whenever I can’t stop looking at the word counter, I use Scrivener’s built-in Compose function. Similar to Microsoft Word’s Focus mode, this expands the writing window to fill the whole screen with a black background. In Scrivener, this includes a very nice feature which makes sure the text you’re writing is always in the middle of the screen, sort of like using a typewriter.
Outlining and note-taking
Another helpful feature is the Outlining function. It gives you an overview of your documents and how they’re grouped in your project. In the picture below, you see that it’s also possible to set goals for individual texts and to give a label and status to each piece of text. In my case, I’ve given both statuses and labels that also indicate the status, which is perhaps overkill.
The columns you see here can be modified. I have chosen the columns relevant to my project, but there are many other options. One great thing about this overview is that it also let’s you set the Section Type to be used when compiling your document (more on that below).
A feature I use a lot it the Notes function, which can be found in the right pane of every document. Here, I write all the though that come to mind while I am writing, or when I’m not writing and suddenly think “ooh, I need to remember this aspect of my analyse”, or “I need to make sure to quote this article”. Before, I would just write it in random notes somewhere on my computer or on a piece of paper incidentally lying in front of me on my desk. Now, I always know where to put these kinds of thoughts – and, most importantly, where to find them again.
In the image, you see the Notes function in pale yellow, and above it, the title of the document and some space to write a description of this document. I only use this Synopsis feature for my main documents to outline the argument I am making in the chapter, but it’s a useful tool for outlining, and as you can see in the image above, it also shows up in the Outline.
As you can see, I also sometimes add a date to my notes just to remember if it’s an old thought I had years ago, or one I had a few days ago. In this pane you also have the Comments & Footnotes section (indicated by the little speech bubble above the Synopsis) which is also useful for commenting directly on your text.
A feature I won’t go into detail with here, is the split screen function (which is represented by an icon in the top right corner of the writing window), but it’s very useful if you keep your notes in another file in the document, e.g. in the Research folder in your Scrivener project, and want to be able to see your notes and your text at the same time. XX has a nice guide on how you can use the notes and highlights you’ve made in Zotero in Scrivener.
Compiling and layouting
The steepest learning curve for Scrivener is probably the Compiling function. This feature can become a really good friend once you master it, but it takes some trial and error to get there. As noted above, each text in your project has a Section Type. This can either be set manually or assigned to your project following some rules, e.g. on what level the text is compared to the main folder. You set the formatting of the section types before compiling, and they are then used to add different formatting to the sections. You can also download formats made by other people on the internet, or you can just use the format included in the template you chose. This is super useful if you find all of the features a little overwhelming, but if you want full control, you have it.
Antoher great thing when it comes to controlling the formatting of your document, is Scrivener’s use of placeholders. This is both used for autonumbering your sections and subsections (which you can finde a guide to here), and for specifying the place and features of any images or tables you include in your document by using an <$img> or <$n:figure> tag. This is super useful if you want to include a figure in your text. The image is represent by the placeholder which is then only added to the document once you compile it. This means you don’t have to deal with images bobbing aroung like the often do in Word, and if you decide to update the image or figure at some point, you just replace the original file (and keep the name). This way you always know that your content is up to date, and it’s updated everywhere in the document, in case you forgot that you included it in several places. AND, Scrivener takes care of the numbering for you, making sure you never refer to the wrong figure, (as long as you put the right placeholder in the text, of course).
In the Edit Format menu within Compile, you can also set the text to be included in the header and footer of your document. This includes page numbering, but it’s also here you can add if maybe you want to insert the title of your project on every other page in the project. Or you want different numbering of the Front matter of your project (the part that includes your thank you’s and maybe an abstract). Scrivener has a whole list of placeholders which can be accessed through the Help menu within Scrivener under “List of All Placeholders“. Some of them can be used within the main document, others are only for use in the header and footer. There’s a helpful guide here.
A note on references and citation software
One downside to writing larger projects in Scrivener is that it does not integrate well with referencing software, such as Endnote, Mendeley, or Zotero. All of these require an extra step of formatting after you compile, and extra steps always leave more room for errors. Luckily, many nice people on YouTube have made guides on how to make it work. Here’s one on EndNote and Mendeley, and here is a long one on Zotero and Scrivener which I found really useful since I’m working with Zotero myself. Although I did not like the look and feel of Zotero to begin with, I have really come to love it’s features. And most importantly, it’s open scource, so I won’t be locked out as soon as I’m no longer employed at the university. But more on the choice of citiation software some other time.
If you keep all your resources in a folder in whichever programme you use and know you have used all of them in your project, it’s also a fine solution to get the programme to generate a bibliography and just copy/paste that into the References part of your Scrivener project.
Bottom line: Scrivener cannot integrate dynamically with citation software like Word can, i.e. it is not “cite while you write”.
See this resource from the Literatue and Latte website on solutions for different programmes.
Collaboration and feedback
Scrivener itself is not really set up for collaboration, but if you need to send some text for feedback, you can easily compile whichever part of your text you need as a Word document – and many other formats.
Useful resources:
- A nice runthrough of how Scrivener works and how to set it up for thesis writing (the video is from 2018, so the layout is a little different, but the content is still useful)
- A short guide on using Scrivener and Zotero to organize resources for dissertation writing
- Scrivener Virgin has some good guides to setting up Scrivener, although they’re not always exhausting enough when it comes to the finer details
This post is not sponsored or affiliated with Scrivener or Literature and Latte in any way.