Scrivener

Writing a book or a thesis involves seemingly endless revisions and it can be very difficult to keep track of them. Also, constant tinkering doesn’t always improve matters. With Scrivener you can take a Snapshot of your current document before editing and then revert or roll back to the original version if it ends up looking worse. I really struggled with the word count in my thesis (it was around 20,000 too many), so Snapshots helped me experiment with removing quotes and peripheral arguments. Sometimes the impact was too great in later chapters, so I was able to roll back to the original version. ...

The Scratchpad might sound like something your cat would use, but it’s actually a very handy feature in Scrivener. Sometimes our writing can be interrupted by random thoughts; sometimes they’re even useful. With the Scratchpad you can quickly jot them down in a pop-up window and return to the task in hand. It’s not linked to any particular document so is perfect for anything that isn’t obviously related to your current project. The Scratchpad also works outside Scrivener, although it needs to be running in the background. As the Scratchpad floats freely, you can place it alongside any other application. This makes it ideal for taking notes while you’re reading online. ...

Mindmapping software can often feel overly rigid and complicated for capturing ideas quickly. Scapple, from the makers of the brilliant Scrivener, is a free-form, non-linear application for capturing your thoughts. It’s the closest software can get to a piece of paper and a pen – but you never run out of space. Scapple is available for both Mac and Windows. I’m basing this post on the Mac version, but it works broadly the same on both platforms. ...

Around 10 years ago, I wrote a tutorial on using Zotero with Scrivener through the RTF/ODF plugin. This method was fiddly, but ultimately produced live Zotero citations in a Word or OpenOffice document. When Zotero 7 was launched, this method no longer worked. I updated my tutorial with a doom-laden reflection on why this problem was unlikely to be solved. Happily, the developers of the original plugin have not only updated it but also made it much better than the original. It’s now called ODF/DOCX Scan for Zotero. I’m grateful to Sebastian Karcher and the other volunteers for all their work and also to Professor Michael Cantinotti for alerting me to the update. ...