Scrivener-tastic!

In the throws of putting together my master’s thesis, I really have no complaints. 

Except maybe one.

I have had so many people look at my chapters, pick over the logic and the grammar, the ideas, which is absolutely fine because it is a part of the process, but I have so many draft copies it is difficult to keep track of the work flow. So thank goodness for the awesome people at Literature and Latte^[1]  and Scrivener. I praise Scrivener so much in my everyday life that my cohorts have asked if I get a cut off their sales. I don’t; the product has just made my life entirely easier. And I’m all about easy.

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I’ve created a folder in the Scrivener binder called DRAFTS.

Within that folder, you can see that I have three more folders: My Drafts, Unreviewed Comments, and Reviewed Comments. From here, you can probably pretty much guess what I do. I work from the My Drafts folder, place committee member commented upon PDF drafts in the Unreviewed Comments Folder, until I get a chance to actually look the comments over, and then move those PDFs to the Reviewed Comments Folder. 

This might seem convoluted, but the process works for me. Plus, this way, nothing gets accidentally deleted.

                           
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I created my thesis template from scratch, which has been daunting, but whenever I begin a new project there is always a level of dauntingness that proceeds it. The problem with Scrivener is that there are so many options on how to write and how to organize the writing and researching process. But I am not alone. More importantly, you are not alone. A wealth of Scrivener templates are available online specifically made for academic writing. I have not found any on particular template to my liking, but you can always tweak. For your convenience, I have included the following links to Scrivener templates geared towards academic writing!^[2]

• Michael Axelsen's draft academic template 
• Thaddeus Hunt's Helpful Guidelines to set up Scrivener as a Complete Blogging System 
• The Ohio State University Hacking the Thesis Scrivener Guidelines 
• The Writer's Notebook for Scrivener (for fiction, but may have some useful tools for academic specific writing)

Obviously, though I vehemently disagree, Scrivener isn’t for everyone, so to end today’s post I pose the following question: what software do you utilize for academic writing? And, if you use Scrivener, do you have a specific template you use?

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^[1] Being an English major, you’ve got to just love that name!

^[2] Wow, right?  :)