Scrivener for Collaboration

David Hewson just wrote an article about using Scrivener when collaborating with multiple authors. He points out some nice tricks—especially good when the other authors use something like Word. Check it out:

david hewson on scrivener for collaboration

Don McAllister

If you are a Mac-user then you really want to become familiar with Don McAllister. A few years ago he started a series of "screencasts." These are essentially video tutorials that show you exactly what's going on in a software product. Don is very thorough, has a great voice, and his knowledge of Mac software is thorough and deep. Many of his screencasts are now available only to paid subscribers, but from time to time he does create free ones.

Recently Don created a free 36 minute tutorial about Scrivener 2 for the Mac. (It's also a useful tutorial for users of the Windows beta-version.) You can download the screencast directly from his ScreenCastsOnline website, or watch the YouTube version. Both links are given below.

scrivener 2 screencast @ don's website

scrivener 2 screencast @ youtube

Gwen Hernandez

Gwen is a writer who has a blog named The Edited Life. One of the very cool things she has done is to develop a series of Scrivener how-to posts. Most of her posts were written with Scrivener 1 in mind. With version 2 now released I'm sure Gwen will be adding and editing some of her posts to include new hints and tutorials. Keep in mind that everything she writes about Scrivener version 1 will also apply to version 2. Check out her Scrivener posts at:

Gwen Hernandez on Scrivener

Five Essentials Tutorial

On November 1 Scrivener 2 for the Mac was released. Currently Scrivener for Windows is under development and will likely be released in January or February of 2011.

Several faculty in the School of Education are getting Scrivener and I've created a tutorial mainly for them, but anyone is welcome to download and use this tutorial. The tutorial covers, at least for me, the five essential features you want to know about Scrivener. In essence this tutorial presents why someone would use Scrivener rather than being a how to tutorial.

Perhaps the most important concept to understand is that Scrivener creates a writing environment rather than being simply "writing software." The distinction is important and I think becomes clear once you've viewed the tutorial.

Here are the five big areas covered:

• Chunking
• Organizational Flexibility
• Integrated Research
• Compiling (Exporting)
• Meta-Data

Realistically there are several other important features about Scrivener—and what I list as the big five may not be the same for everyone. However, this 22 minute tutorial does provide a decent overview for academics wanting to get started with Scrivener. The download is about 135 Mb, and the movie will play fine on your iPad (sync via iTunes) as well as your computer.

scrivener 2 essentials movie download

Scrivener and Meta-Data

One of the very powerful and enhanced features in Scrivener 2.0 is how it handles meta-data. There are actually two categories of "meta-data" in Scrivener: ordinary meta-data (such as keywords, labels, and much more) plus custom meta-data. The link below provides a very short introduction to custom meta-data in the Scrivener writing environment:

scrivener custom meta-data tutorial