website design, optimisation and content

Words aren’t all about Word

Posted by Peter Labrow on 8 October 2009

Although Microsoft Word files are almost a global standard for distributing text, the program itself is surprisingly underpowered when it comes to writing anything of substance.

Every so often, I’m asked which tools I use for a particular job – usually coding websites, manipulating images or designing brochures. It’s taken as a given that when I’m writing copy, I’m probably doing it in Word. Well, often I’m not.

Microsoft Word is not always the right tool for every job

There’s nothing especially wrong with Word. It’s a fine program capable of many things – although it does often overstep the mark and try to be all things to all people. Its page layout capabilities, for example, remain, despite its considerable pedigree, nothing short of an embarrassment. 

Where I feel it falls down the most is when you have to write anything of great depth or length. It just isn’t the right tool for the job – it’s an electronic notepad, which accepts your musing in largely linear form and does nothing to help you construct a document. As such, I find that it can actually encourage poor, meandering writing.

No, what I use for many writing tasks is the excellent Scrivener, from Literature and Latte.

What Scrivener isn’t

Before we look at what Scrivener is, let’s look at what it isn’t. Unlike Word, it doesn’t try to cover every base. It has no page layout facilities whatsoever, and next to no formatting controls beyond the obvious bold, italic, tabs and so on. Mmm – sounds quite poor for a word processing application?

What Scrivener is

Scrivener is a tool to really help you methodically construct more detailed or longer documents. These can be articles, books, papers – anything. It’s minimalist in approach, with an interface that’s designed to help you focus on your writing – you don’t get distracted by things that don’t matter (such as formatting, which you can do later).

Collecting and managing your research files

So how does it differ from Word? For starters, it’s not just designed to help you write, it’s also designed to help you research. Once you’ve created a Scrivener project, you can add your research files to the project so that these are always available. These can be text files, image files, audio and even website pages. You can structure these however you want, and change the structure at any time. When you’re writing, you can have your research available in a second pane, or just slide it out of the way when you don’t need it.

Managing research files – in this case, as screen shot of a Google search page

Navigation and changes to document structure

Another key area where Word is lacking is in managing document structure. Yes, the later versions of Word do have a navigation pane of page thumbnails to help you move through a document and there’s an outliner – but that’s it. Scrivener lets you break your document down into sections and subsections. These could be chapters and scenes, for example. You can view these as a single unbroken document, as an outline, as a document tree or as a graphical corkboard – and, with the latter three views, moving one part of a document somewhere else is as easy as dragging and dropping it. No more cutting, working out where you need to go, pasting and then checking you’ve done it right – just drag, and you’re done.

It’s this organisation of ideas that encourages good writing: encouraging the writer to create a meaningful structure to a document with ease, then change it whenever needed with equal ease.

Managing document structure, using the corkboard

Built-in version control

Another area where Word falls on its face is version control. It doesn’t have any. So, writers are forced to keep saving different versions of documents when changes are made. Scrivener has built-in version control, using ‘snapshots’ which you can take at any time – enabling you to roll back to a previous version without any messing around. If you’re of a slightly technical bent, Scrivener interfaces with the SVN version control software (available free) which allows you to keep and compare multiple versions of files easily. Although SVN is mostly used by developers (I use it to version control website pages) it’s just as useful for writers, though it can be a bit fiddly to set up.

Full-screen mode

There’s a full-screen mode, for those who like to write without any distraction whatsoever – and you can customise this to your own preference in terms of background and text colour and width of ‘paper’.

Output and publishing

When it comes to publish or output your job, Scrivener holds up its hands and says quite openly: “this isn’t what I do” – instead it lets you export to pretty much any word processing or page layout program for that final edit, tickle up and formatting.

Compiling and exporting your project

Website copywriting

When I’m writing copy for websites, Scrivener really comes into its own. First, I usually need to research many things – the customer, the customer’s market (if it’s one I’m not familiar with), the customer’s products/services and the customer’s competitors. All of that can sit comfortably in my Scrivener project – along with any interview notes I may take when talking to people within the customer’s organisation. Once I start writing, I can easily create a structure that matches the envisaged website – and move topics around with ease as needed. Version control lets me roll back when I’ve gone down a blind alley. Yes, I could do it in Word, but it’s so much more work. When I’m ready for the client’s comments, I simply export it to a Word document and send it along.

System requirements

There is one caveat: it’s Mac only, which is fine for me, since that’s the computer I use, but locks PC users firmly out. A PC version is unlikely, since Scrivener works by using the Cocoa framework that’s built into the Mac OS (unlike Windows, Mac OS has a basic page editing framework, Cocoa, that can be used by any application – a key advantage being that when Cocoa gets new features, your application does too). Scrivener works with Tiger and above, including Snow Leopard.

Perhaps the best news is the price. At $39.95, Scrivener is excellent value.

If you write any length of text for a living, or as part of your job – and you’re on a Mac – you should take a look at Scrivener. The initial moments are something of a culture shock, as all of the comfort blankets of Word’s myriad toolbars evaporate – but as a research and creative writing tool, it can’t really be bettered. Until version 2 comes along.

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