I think I’m in love! In the past month, I have completely changed my blogging workflow. That’s because I have discovered the joys of using Scrivener. Originally a Mac tool, Scrivener is software for writers. It’s now available for Windows, and that’s the version I’m using. I’d heard about it before but figured it was only for novel writers. Boy, was I wrong! Although I wasn’t sure how it would work for a professional blogger, I found an article my Thaddeus Hunt (one of my new go-to sources for Scrivener information) outlining how he was using Scrivener for blogging. I used his example to set up a draft project to work with and have found it the most useful new tool I’ve tried in a while.

With Scrivener, the idea is that you create a project file for a particular writing project. This contains all the information you need for that project. For novelists, that means creating chapters and sections and keeping track of characters and locations, but how would that work for blogging?

More Here – Scrivener: a Great Tool for Professional Bloggers

I was asked how to format footnotes when using Scrivener, which led me to the question how to preserve formatting styles when compiling Scrivener into Microsoft Word documents.

While Scrivener is the best writing software I have ever worked with (and still work with), it is not made to format texts. The focus is on writing. Personally, I highly recommend using Scrivener to create the text, edit it, put out draft after draft until the text is “finished”. And then compile the text and use another program to create a nicely formatted text.

While I used InDesign for my PhD thesis, many users will probably want to use Microsoft Word or a similar program. Personal hatred aside, Word does have a few strengths. And if you use a lot of footnotes and want more control over them, you might want to use it for the final version. Not to mention that many people still use it, so if you want to give it to your supervisor, you probably have to.

More Here – Scrivener and Paragraph/Character Styles in Microsoft Word (with a focus on Footnotes)

A short while ago I published an article called 5 reasons for using Scrivener for writing books. Well, a week or so later I have discovered more about using the program. As usual, I am learning on a need-to-know basis. I realise that this could lead to a lot of wasted time, but the other side of the coin is that I don’t know what I need to know until I need to know it, and so ploughing through the manual or the tutorial could be an even bigger waste of time. Bear in mind that the manual is 540 pages long, and the tutorial takes two hours, and you will see what I mean.

Fortunately, the program is reasonably intuitive in parts, and there is a good help forum.

I wondered: could Scrivener be used to write blog articles?

So, I tried writing a blog post with it. In fact, the article about Scrivener (cited above) was structured using Scrivener.

Having experimented, there are, I think, two advantages in using Scrivener for blog post writing:

More here – Using Scrivener for blogging