Sunday, August 21, 2011

Another Reason to Love Scrivener

I promise I'll stop flogging this software soon. But I've been working on my cat-herdingest syllabus -- the one that requires a syllabus, daily lesson plans, in-class activities, worksheets, workshops, pdf readings, and all of this to be organized in the proper order -- and let me tell you that Scrivener (especially its outliner function!) is making this all fully doable.

I am happy.

10 comments:

Comrade PhysioProf said...

I would prefer not to.

TriPartite Academic said...

Hi Notorious--I'm sure you've posted on this before, but any tips for the more technologically-challenged like myself who'd like to find out more about Scrivener?

Dr. Koshary said...

Some time, you must come around to my place and show me what on earth is so useful about that program. I'm utterly confounded that you and so many others seem to get a lot out of it. I felt like I was trying to put someone else's suit on over my head. I've still only used one day of the trial period so far.

Notorious Ph.D. said...

@ CPP: Yep. I've always thought that would be a great tagline for the software: "For writers who would prefer not to."

@ Tripartite Academic: You can check it out here: http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php

@ Dr. Koshary: I find it really good for organizing materials for a large project I'm working on, and for breaking it up into manageable chunks, or pulling little bits together. The outliner function is great for brains that need to see things in order to organize them -- if you're a person who has found it useful to lay out a ton of index cards on a big table and move them around, then Scrivener works really well. But like any writing tool, it works really well for some people, and not so well for others. And there is a bit of a learning curve.

undine said...

Let me echo Dr. Koshary. I've bought Scrivener but haven't used it much yet.

TriPartite Academic said...

Thank you for the link!

Another Damned Medievalist said...

Why didn't I think of that?? Doing it now!

thefrogprincess said...

I do almost everything in Scrivener, including writing these syllabi. I probably don't take full advantage of the actual organization features like the outline and what not, but still, can't stop raving about it.

Carl Anderson said...

Hail Scrivener! I've used the Mac version for years, beginning back in the creative writing workshop I founded in the UK -- though at the time I had fallen out of academia. Now I've fallen back in, though I haven't really started using Scrivener for "academic purposes" yet, as my "office" machine is a PC -- but I'm watching the development of Scrivener for Windows avidly, and installing the beta versions (when I can bludgeon the IT crowd here into giving me admin privileges), and I look forward to going full-on cross-platform (since they're unlikely to give me a Mac! :))

Archaeology Prof said...

I love Scrivener too! I especially like the outline function for organizing talks!