After pulling an all-nighter Sunday night into Monday morning, I finally completed my appellate brief to the Supreme Court. And fortunately for me, I encountered no problems during my hour long drive down to Charleston to deliver it in my sleep deprived condition. I felt like I was back in my first year of law school having to turn in an end of semester writing assignment.
As stated in my last blog entry, during the writing of this brief was the first time that I’d used Scrivener, and I was impressed with its ability to keep you focused on the structure of your writing as you write, as well as being a database for all your source material related to the project. Now having completed the writing assignment I was working on, I have a few additional thoughts.
The most difficult part of using Scrivener for me was when “compiling” my draft into a format for final editing. It took me a few tries to get it just the way I wanted, but if you google a query asking about compiling in Scrivener, there are several helpful articles.
Also, sometimes, you just have play around with a new piece of software to find out which variable is the one that’s causing you problem. After compiling my draft on the third try, I pretty much had what I wanted for final editing. The problem with the compile feature is simply that there is a plethora of options ranging from e-book format to standard manuscript and so on and so forth. I simply wanted something that’d look good in Microsoft Word, so I stuck with the Original format.
I was working on a pretty tight deadline, since I was compiling my draft at 1:00 a.m. in the morning and the finished product was due by the close of business that day. But an additional benefit to Scrivener that I found at this stage was that I realized that up to this point, for the most part, all I had been concerned with was content creation. I know if I had written my draft in Microsoft Word, I would have spent the whole time fiddling with formatting and other technical issues. When I'm writing in Word, I can’t help but think about the finished product, but while working in Scrivener, aside from counting up the words in the separate parts of my draft to give myself an idea of how many double-spaced pages I was getting close to (I ended up have 24 pages), I mostly just stayed focused on getting my thoughts in print.
But once I transferred the draft to Word, then my entire focus was formatting. Everything was transferred in single space, so I simply started from the top and went to the bottom formatting along the way. The biggest changes I had to make was changing the style to my headings so they would be recognized by Word's table of contents feature and formatting my block quotations. But other than that, pretty simple stuff, such as spacing and fixing tab stops.
Then it took me quite a few times to get the Table of Contents the way I wanted it (unfortunately, I didn’t notice until after reviewing the filed copy of my brief that it left out one of the entries, ugh!). And after that, I spent a great deal of time on the Table of Authorities. In the course of working on this brief, I was reviewing the last Supreme Court brief I had done, which would have been the last time I had bothered with a table of contents or a table of authorities, and I found that it had been almost exactly a year. Using the Table of Authorities feature in Word for Mac 2011 was a very cumbersome process, but oh well, its required so I had to do it. And of course, it was a heck of a lot easier than trying to manually type in the nearly 50 or so authorities I had cited in my brief and pray that the pagination not change. So…by 3:30 a.m., I had finally put everything in the final form and it was ready for the final proofread, which I did after getting a few hours of shut-eye that morning. After reviewing the finished product, I am quite pleased with it, despite a few errors that I'm sure I missed. And completing the writing project gave me an additional reason for why scrivener is great: task batching.
Task batching is a productivity concept that basically says its a lot easier to do a lot of the same tasks at once than to switch from one kind of task to another kind of task and so on. So if I’m at the office and I finished making a phone call, and I know I have two more people I need to call today, I might as well call those people right now and get it out of the way while I’m in my phone-talking frame of mind.
As this relates to writing in Scrivener, as I said above, Scrivener keeps you focused on one thing and one thing only: content creation. Then when you’ve created all the content you desire, you can transfer the draft to whatever application you like and work on formatting and other technical aspects of turning your draft into a final draft. This way, you don’t overload your brain. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that taking the few seconds it takes to turn a paragraph into a single spaced blocked quotation is going to kill you. But when you have to do that several times, you are taking yourself out of your creative frame of mind and going into your technical frame of mind. This may stymie the creative process.
Another aspect of Scrivener I’ve found that I like is that once I get those creative juices flowing, I am really surprised how many words I’ve typed up with I look down at the word count. I don’t know if this is mainly due to the fact that I’m not dividing my time between writing and editing or more because Scrivener breaks up your sections into its separate parts, giving each its own text file, and the act of breaking the separate parts up, really lets you focus on each to the fullest extent possible. Whatever the reason, I simply found that with this last writing project, my flow just seemed a lot better than the last complex writing project I did. Maybe this was a fluke or maybe Scrivener deserves the credit, but I will have to use the program a few more times to be sure.
Wednesday, December 3, 2014
Friday, November 28, 2014
Scrivener Review
Much of what I know about writing processes I learned from Bryan Garner in his great book, “Legal Writing in Plain English.” In that book, Garner states that there are four stages to good writing: (1) mad man; (2) architect; (3) construction worker; and (4) judge.
The mad man stage is about putting ideas on paper in a non-linear fashion. This is where mind mapping (inter-connected thought bubbles that look like a spider web) comes in handy. After mad man is the architect stage, where all those connected ideas are put into a linear outline. Then comes the construction worker, who must follow the architect’s outline by filling in the gaps and making the first draft. Then in the judge phase the writer proofreads the draft.
Garner does an excellent job of showing the writer how to apply a systematic method to writing. Garner posits that what writers often experience as writer’s block is a result of the mind shutting down by being overloaded with the task of having to complete all four of these stages simultaneously. Nevertheless, many times knowledge is not enough to our success, regardless of the endeavor. We must try to draw a line between what we know and what we actually do. Many of us feel an obsessive need to just get it out on paper. Until we see it on paper, we feel an irrational fear that we’ll never get started and, of course, never finish our writing projects.
As a person who takes pride in his writing, I always felt a pang of indignation whenever an old boss of mine would request that I just “rough it out.” Still, many times, especially when working on complex projects, I feel a need to just put pen to paper and start writing; mad man and architect stages be damned! Of course, many times I begin legal writing by doing exhaustive research, which usually gets those “mad man” juices flowing despite my neglecting to do a mind map.
For my lastest legal brief, I used the Scrivener program by Literature and Latte, and I must say that I really like it. When using Scrivener, all research material as well as the draft is kept in a single file and in the binder, which is simply a table of contents in the file’s left margin. For each section of the document, there is a new entry in the table of contents and for each entry, there is a plain text file in the main window. The benefit here is that you can move these separate bits of text simply by clicking and dragging the entry in the table of contents to where you want it.
The end result is basically that you can break down your writing project into its separate and discrete parts. And you can very easily move the different parts to change the structure of your draft as you see fit. When you’re finished, you can “compose” the separate text files into a single document and export it in whatever format you like.
You can also keep your research in the binder, so you can access your source material easily while you write and its kept altogether with your draft. This might seem to not be anything groundbreaking. And it's not really. But at the same time, Scrivener seems to strike the perfect balance between maintaining flexibility in your writing while giving the writer the ability to satify the urge to just “get it down on paper.”
As Garner states, the real danger in jumping ahead to the construction worker stage before going through the mad man and architect steps is that you become wedded to the structure you adopt for a piece of writing once you start putting it in linear order, even though that structure may not be the most effective one for getting your points across. By putting text in separate files and giving the writer the flexibility to easily change the structure (even more easily than cutting a paragraph at the bottom of a document and pasting it at the top in Microsoft Word), Scrivener may help the writer from becoming too wedded to a linear order before picking the most effective one.
Moreover, Scrivener’s emphasis on putting down your structure first in the binder section into a table of contents gets you thinking about structure from the start. It also gets the writer in the good (and often under-used) technique of using headings to break the text in your document down into as small of parts as possible.
In today’s fast-paced environment where everyone is “multi-tasking” by checking email, Facebook feeds, and news articles at the same time, the writer no longer has the luxury of writing never-ending blocks of prose. If the modern writer has any chance of getting the message across as a whole, he or she now must break down every thought into digestable bits of information. If not, today’s reader will just give up.
The mad man stage is about putting ideas on paper in a non-linear fashion. This is where mind mapping (inter-connected thought bubbles that look like a spider web) comes in handy. After mad man is the architect stage, where all those connected ideas are put into a linear outline. Then comes the construction worker, who must follow the architect’s outline by filling in the gaps and making the first draft. Then in the judge phase the writer proofreads the draft.
Garner does an excellent job of showing the writer how to apply a systematic method to writing. Garner posits that what writers often experience as writer’s block is a result of the mind shutting down by being overloaded with the task of having to complete all four of these stages simultaneously. Nevertheless, many times knowledge is not enough to our success, regardless of the endeavor. We must try to draw a line between what we know and what we actually do. Many of us feel an obsessive need to just get it out on paper. Until we see it on paper, we feel an irrational fear that we’ll never get started and, of course, never finish our writing projects.
As a person who takes pride in his writing, I always felt a pang of indignation whenever an old boss of mine would request that I just “rough it out.” Still, many times, especially when working on complex projects, I feel a need to just put pen to paper and start writing; mad man and architect stages be damned! Of course, many times I begin legal writing by doing exhaustive research, which usually gets those “mad man” juices flowing despite my neglecting to do a mind map.
For my lastest legal brief, I used the Scrivener program by Literature and Latte, and I must say that I really like it. When using Scrivener, all research material as well as the draft is kept in a single file and in the binder, which is simply a table of contents in the file’s left margin. For each section of the document, there is a new entry in the table of contents and for each entry, there is a plain text file in the main window. The benefit here is that you can move these separate bits of text simply by clicking and dragging the entry in the table of contents to where you want it.
The end result is basically that you can break down your writing project into its separate and discrete parts. And you can very easily move the different parts to change the structure of your draft as you see fit. When you’re finished, you can “compose” the separate text files into a single document and export it in whatever format you like.
You can also keep your research in the binder, so you can access your source material easily while you write and its kept altogether with your draft. This might seem to not be anything groundbreaking. And it's not really. But at the same time, Scrivener seems to strike the perfect balance between maintaining flexibility in your writing while giving the writer the ability to satify the urge to just “get it down on paper.”
As Garner states, the real danger in jumping ahead to the construction worker stage before going through the mad man and architect steps is that you become wedded to the structure you adopt for a piece of writing once you start putting it in linear order, even though that structure may not be the most effective one for getting your points across. By putting text in separate files and giving the writer the flexibility to easily change the structure (even more easily than cutting a paragraph at the bottom of a document and pasting it at the top in Microsoft Word), Scrivener may help the writer from becoming too wedded to a linear order before picking the most effective one.
Moreover, Scrivener’s emphasis on putting down your structure first in the binder section into a table of contents gets you thinking about structure from the start. It also gets the writer in the good (and often under-used) technique of using headings to break the text in your document down into as small of parts as possible.
In today’s fast-paced environment where everyone is “multi-tasking” by checking email, Facebook feeds, and news articles at the same time, the writer no longer has the luxury of writing never-ending blocks of prose. If the modern writer has any chance of getting the message across as a whole, he or she now must break down every thought into digestable bits of information. If not, today’s reader will just give up.
Sunday, October 19, 2014
The thorny issue of the iOS-ification of OS X and vice versa
I just installed OS X Yosemite and the iOS-ification of OS X is apparent in this version. Of course, through the invention of hand off, you can now pick up from something your were working on in iOS and begin working on it in OS X. Unfortunately, because my Macbook Pro is Mid–2010, I cannot use hand off due to not having Bluetooth 4.0. But it appears that I can use the rest of the continuity package in Yosemite, specifically those relating to the use of my phone’s calling and text functions on Mac.
I was happy to see that SMS text messages are now listed in the messages app of my Mac. But where OS X Yosemite is really similar to iOS is the design. The buttons have a very similar with a flat design. The similarities between iOS and OS X apps are particularly apparent when comparing the iTunes app in OS X to iOS.
Another way that Apple seems to be trying to bridge the gap between OS X and iOS is iCloud Drive. iCloud Drive took overnight to load and I am not impressed with the speed of syncing. Maybe it's just because this is the first weekend after Yosemite’s release and a lot of people are syncing at the same time, overloading Apple servers. But Apple seems to have missed the boat on this one. Third party developers like Dropbox saw a need for this syncing capability and filled it years ago. As long as Dropbox and Google Drive continue to meet my needs, I doubt that i’ll begin using iCloud drive very much. The need for iCloud drive will also appear to decrease over time now that Apple is finally permitting the use of extensions in iOS 8. As third party apps are given greater access to interact with each other, syncing between apps using iCloud and third party cloud apps will become less necessary to individual workflows.
As Graham Spencer stated in his article on MacStories, the biggest problem in working with iCloud Drive on OS X and iOS is the lack of Finder on iOS and Apple’s aversion to adding folders to iOS. This really goes to the heart of the matter. Microsoft’s Windows 8.1 has made the operating system for PC and tablet one and the same. My understanding is that from a design aspect this has proved problematic. Because I don’t have a PC or Surface, I wouldn’t know. But this is going to continue to be the thorniest problem for Apple.
Apple’s latest release of the iPad Air 2 and iPad Mini 3 shows that the development of the iPad is basically floundering. These updates are evoluntionary, not revolutionary, which wouldn’t be a problem except for the fact that iPhones sell like hotcakes year after year and iPads don’t. Adding a gold color option and Touch ID doesn’t give anyone a sufficient reason to upgrade, except for people who have too much disposable scratch. I have an iPad mini and even though I’d love to buy an iPad Air, these updates are not compelling to me. Don’t get me wrong, I love touch ID on my iPhone 6, but that feature alone wouldn’t get me to open my wallet.
Until Apple really finds a way to boost iPad’s productivity potential, money will be left on the table. And simply making the iPad bigger is not going to solve the problem. Many have written about rumors of a 12 inch “iPad Pro” that can have multi-tasking and split screen capabilities. Such a productivity-centered device, I think ,would persuade a lot of people to upgrade, especially since many will likely opt out this year. However, Apple’s software team is really going to have to come up with a feature rich device to pull this off. A frustration of mine is when I begin working on something on the Mac and can’t edit my work on the iPad. But this trade off is acceptable to me because I need the portability of the iPad when I’m walking around the courtroom and need to quickly reference documents in a trial.
Simply making OS X and iOS one and the same is probably not the answer, but unless Apple comes up with some great software features with the “iPad Pro,” I will probably just keep my iPad Mini until it dies and buy a Macbook Air instead. Of course, what I think would solve all my problems would be if Apple would turn the Macbook Air into a hybrid with a detachable keyboard that could go from OS X to iOS when you are using it as a tablet. I’m not a software engineer, so maybe this is asking too much. Of course, even if its possible and it would result in massive sales, the consensus seems to be that there’s no way that Apple is going to do this. In any case, it’ll be another year before we see the next iPad update. Until then, I am looking forward to see if the Macbook Air update in the new year will be a simple refresh or if we might see some major design changes.
In any case, OS X Yosemite and iOS 8 working together seems to be a step in the right direction for Apple. Hopefully, Apple will keep heading in this direction and get it right for the most part along the way.
I was happy to see that SMS text messages are now listed in the messages app of my Mac. But where OS X Yosemite is really similar to iOS is the design. The buttons have a very similar with a flat design. The similarities between iOS and OS X apps are particularly apparent when comparing the iTunes app in OS X to iOS.
Another way that Apple seems to be trying to bridge the gap between OS X and iOS is iCloud Drive. iCloud Drive took overnight to load and I am not impressed with the speed of syncing. Maybe it's just because this is the first weekend after Yosemite’s release and a lot of people are syncing at the same time, overloading Apple servers. But Apple seems to have missed the boat on this one. Third party developers like Dropbox saw a need for this syncing capability and filled it years ago. As long as Dropbox and Google Drive continue to meet my needs, I doubt that i’ll begin using iCloud drive very much. The need for iCloud drive will also appear to decrease over time now that Apple is finally permitting the use of extensions in iOS 8. As third party apps are given greater access to interact with each other, syncing between apps using iCloud and third party cloud apps will become less necessary to individual workflows.
As Graham Spencer stated in his article on MacStories, the biggest problem in working with iCloud Drive on OS X and iOS is the lack of Finder on iOS and Apple’s aversion to adding folders to iOS. This really goes to the heart of the matter. Microsoft’s Windows 8.1 has made the operating system for PC and tablet one and the same. My understanding is that from a design aspect this has proved problematic. Because I don’t have a PC or Surface, I wouldn’t know. But this is going to continue to be the thorniest problem for Apple.
Apple’s latest release of the iPad Air 2 and iPad Mini 3 shows that the development of the iPad is basically floundering. These updates are evoluntionary, not revolutionary, which wouldn’t be a problem except for the fact that iPhones sell like hotcakes year after year and iPads don’t. Adding a gold color option and Touch ID doesn’t give anyone a sufficient reason to upgrade, except for people who have too much disposable scratch. I have an iPad mini and even though I’d love to buy an iPad Air, these updates are not compelling to me. Don’t get me wrong, I love touch ID on my iPhone 6, but that feature alone wouldn’t get me to open my wallet.
Until Apple really finds a way to boost iPad’s productivity potential, money will be left on the table. And simply making the iPad bigger is not going to solve the problem. Many have written about rumors of a 12 inch “iPad Pro” that can have multi-tasking and split screen capabilities. Such a productivity-centered device, I think ,would persuade a lot of people to upgrade, especially since many will likely opt out this year. However, Apple’s software team is really going to have to come up with a feature rich device to pull this off. A frustration of mine is when I begin working on something on the Mac and can’t edit my work on the iPad. But this trade off is acceptable to me because I need the portability of the iPad when I’m walking around the courtroom and need to quickly reference documents in a trial.
Simply making OS X and iOS one and the same is probably not the answer, but unless Apple comes up with some great software features with the “iPad Pro,” I will probably just keep my iPad Mini until it dies and buy a Macbook Air instead. Of course, what I think would solve all my problems would be if Apple would turn the Macbook Air into a hybrid with a detachable keyboard that could go from OS X to iOS when you are using it as a tablet. I’m not a software engineer, so maybe this is asking too much. Of course, even if its possible and it would result in massive sales, the consensus seems to be that there’s no way that Apple is going to do this. In any case, it’ll be another year before we see the next iPad update. Until then, I am looking forward to see if the Macbook Air update in the new year will be a simple refresh or if we might see some major design changes.
In any case, OS X Yosemite and iOS 8 working together seems to be a step in the right direction for Apple. Hopefully, Apple will keep heading in this direction and get it right for the most part along the way.
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