Tools: Review of Scrivener after a Week, from a Non Professional

As a child, I loved to write. I wrote a lot of fiction but I didn’t get as far as writing a book. I imagined one day in my adult life I would publish a book but didn’t try to do it as a child.

As a college student, I remember feeling excited about writing papers. But mostly I remembered professors trying to teach how important it was for our writing to demonstrate our understanding of the material, our critical thinking skills, and that we knew how to express ourselves effectively.

Effective Communication as a Tool

I think I appreciated their mission more than most of my college peers. But didn’t realize the true importance of what they were teaching or how it would be a tool to add to our toolbox until later.

Like you perhaps, my professional life in business started with entry level positions and initially my writing was mainly for emails. At that time phones and fax were still heavily used. But as email become and more popular, we began to write more.

We started using the computer, another tool, more and more overall and it felt we were more productive but there was one thing that I didn’t care for: email churn.

It was very annoying to me. I know that may sound harsh but it’s true. I felt there was so much time being wasted with the back and forth, the misunderstandings. The good thing is that it got me thinking.

How could I help reduce the churn?

Leveraging what I learned in college, I started to review and revise each email…oftentimes multiple times before hitting send. I noticed it was helping. So I kept at it. And now I’m known for my effective emails.

Inspired

The email churn situation affected me in an unexpected way. It got me to enjoy writing nonfiction. I felt inspired because I saw how effective intentional everyday business writing could be. I was by no means a professional writer or a purist but I was inspired.

You may be wondering what this has to do with Scrivener. Using writing skills that I improved on during college helped me to see how much I enjoy writing nonfiction. I only needed to use the tool of review and revision to recognize it.

And using Sciverner for a week has gotten me excited about continuing to write my eBook on entrepreneurial roles. I had been dreading the organization of the research. I’m sure professional writers have great methods for organizing their research but I didn’t want to invest a lot of time and money in learning those various methods. So when I saw a 50% discount on Sciverner I jumped at it.

Tool Review

Sciverner is now one of the tools I use to organize my research for my eBook as well as other content. For me so far, the top 3 features are

1) Easy access to multiple chapters at once – having easy access to multiple chapters at the same time means that I don’t have to have multiple windows opened in Word, which can be really distracting for me. For example, when I want to check on something I wrote in Chapter 1, I click on Chapter 1 and then click back. It’s so easy.

2) Research folder – I’ve set up corresponding research files for each of my chapters. As I come across various information or thoughts that I want to include in each chapter, I add it to the corresponding research file. It’s nice to everything in the same location.

3) Project notes – The Project Notes feature allows me to keep any overarching themes and/or concepts in one place. I check back to it often to make sure I’m writing a congruent piece.

I’m not sure how much time Sciverner will end up saving me but I’m guessing tens of hours for the upcoming eBook. I love using tools, be it knowledge, experience, skills, technology, etc. to be more efficient and effective and help me achieve my goals. And who knows maybe one day I will write my fiction book after all.

Would love to hear from you. Similar to my story on translating writing skills from college to the workplace, do you also have a story to share? Either from college to workplace or workplace to entrepreneurship? Bonus: name a tool that has inspired you to do something you have been putting off. Please share in the comments section.