Blogjune again, so I am writing here again.

Con has made a signup list again if that is your sort of thing.

This is not an advertisement below, just a grateful blurble about something that makes my life easier…

If you are writing anything longer than about 500 words, spend a couple of hours getting to know Scrivener .

Well, if you think like me.

I tend to think in chunks and write in chunks… but like to have a vague structure mapped out to hang it all off from the start. Scrivener is a place to write that allows you to plan and rearrange parts of your writing using a visual metaphor of index cards.

(That’s one of about 20 different functions. It has a fabulous “timeline” function that allows fiction writers to re-order their narrative and mix different narrators beautifully. Have a look at Justine Larbalestier’s account of writing her YA novel, Liar, using Scrivener  for details of that use )

So – if you are writing a research paper, you know that you will probably have sections that are:

• Abstract
• Introduction
• Methodology
• Results
• Discussion
• References

You can create index cards for each of these sections and add a summary or write the entire final polished text that will form that section. You can then create subcards for each section, down to paragraph level. The nifty thing that floats my boat is how easy it is to re-arrange these cards into a different order, or just jot down a fragment and slip it in to where it might go – and then at the end give the command “sew it all together, slave” and have a completed, coherent-seeming piece of writing.

I used it earlier this year when I was co-authoring a paper with a student, based on her research for her Master’s thesis. She had around 15 thousand words. For an academic journal article we needed around 7 thousand or less. I cut and pasted her original work into Scrivener in sections by subject heading, each with its own index card. It was very easy to then see which index cards could be metaphorically binned, and which could be sewed together into a new order.

The only tricky bit is that Scrivener does talk to Zotero citation manager.. but only kind of. I have not written anything that requires Zotero integration yet. Scrivener exports to WORD and I tend to do my final tidying up there, once I have the intellectual content right. Catherine Pope has written two posts that gives two methods of “sort of” integrating Zotero and Scrivener – How to Use Zotero with Scrivener Part 1 and How to Use Zotero with Scrivener Part 2.

I just thought of a nifty way I could use Scriverner for blogjune… create 29 more index cards in Scrivener and brainstorm topics, shuffle them all into some kind of order and then work on each one individually as I need a new post … Hmmmmm….