What is the best writing app for academic writing?

February 5, 2021 5:53 AM

What app or program, like Scrivener or Smart Edit, do you use to organize your academic writing?

Hey all - I am looking for some advice about what program to use to organize a 60-80 page research project.

I'm a part time grad student, working on a thesis in that straddles history and social science. A good amount of items in appendix and citations. So far, I have used about 6 different word docs for different sections/chapters, and I use Zotero for citations. I have a first draft that is mostly complete, but is very messy and will need much revision.

I'm expecting to do more full revisions this spring, and then submitting by April/May. This feels like a lot, but also feels doable (I'm anxious but not overwhelmed.) One of the comments my advisor made is that its choppy, and so I am trying to figure out a way to make/track/remember changes throughout without necessarily leaving the writing in 6 different word docs. I am wondering if it makes sense to incorporate something like Scrivener, or SmartEdit, or any other app / writing support program you all have tried and found helpful. The ones I've checked out seem marketed to fiction writers... do they work for academics?

Would you use any kind of app / program for support, if you were in my situation? Also, if you think its a waste of time and energy to try to now start using one, please let me know that. Thanks metafilter eggheads!

posted by RajahKing to Education (11 answers total)

Hi! I ask myself this question a lot and have also googled "Scrivener for academics" a handful of times as I toyed with the idea (you could check the results, too). Ultimately I haven't pressed the "go" button with Scrivener because of the lack of Zotero integration. Curious what others say.

Something that has helped within Word is to make liberal use of the Headings and keep the Navigation pane open.
posted by athirstforsalt at 6:29 AM on February 5, 2021 [3 favorites]

I don't think track changes is the answer to choppy academic writing. If anything, I find it exacerbates the problem. MS Word is completely unfit for academic writing; it's popularity is due to the fact it's on everyone's computer, not because it's any good for this task.

Personally, I'd recommend LaTeX for most scholarly writing. Separating content from presentation facilitates good document design. It's easy enough to get started using the Not So Short Guide to LaTeX.

But you probably want something faster, multifunctional and more modern. Using a system with something like Atom with Markdown will have several benefits. It's fast and free and can be installed in a minute. It's highly extensible and customizable. You can manage your bibliography by linking with Zotero. It also plays well with R if you're using that. Most importantly, it also lets you separate content from presentation, so that you can focus on organization of headings and sections and paragraphs without worrying about breaking the $&@!? formatting for the zillionth time.

Finally, you can use pandoc for interfacing with anyone who demands a .docx file, and produce a range of nice publiclation-ready outputs at the end.

I have been publishing research papers since 2009, but not in your field and not with your advisors, ymmv.
posted by SaltySalticid at 6:41 AM on February 5, 2021 [5 favorites]

The first thing I would recommend is looking to see if your grad school has a dissertation formatting guide or a template that you have to adhere to. My grad school required us to use Microsoft Word functionality to make a table of contents (using different levels and headers and things) which was particularly onerous. The second thing I will recommend is that, if you have a full draft, it seems counterproductive to move it out of Word, then back into Word. ESPECIALLY if you have to deal with formatting nonsense. With respect and a lot of self-recognition, you are procrastinating on the messy, annoying, shitty business of writing a dissertation. You're so close to being done, now is not the time to learn how to code LaTeX or worry about integrating another software. Just power through and finish the dissertation. Come up with the perfect writing system once this nonsense is done - writing your dissertation is unlike other academic writing, so don't worry too much about perfecting your flow right now. Just finish it.

When I was writing my dissertation (7 chapters, ugh), I had a folder for each chapter. Each folder had:
1. Working draft. I tried to keep this pretty neat, and I paid attention to some of the annoying formatting things in this - I put in levels and headers here.
2. "Scratch paper" where I did a lot of noodling, saved sections I loved that my committee did not.
3. Chapter bibliography.
4. All my data, code, etc.
5. Document with all my tables and figure legends.

Then I had an Entire Dissertation word document where I saved my progress on the working drafts every week. Your mileage may vary, but I found the dissertation template from my grad school a bit fiddly, so I tried to update it incrementally and save often as both a word document and a PDF.

I cannot say how much I recommend just powering through Microsoft Word being kind of shitty right now. If you're planning to defend in April and you have lots of revisions, you DO NOT want to spend two weeks noodling around in LaTeX or Scrivener and then having to convert to word to appease your committee and then put it in a new format to appease the graduate school.
posted by ChuraChura at 6:58 AM on February 5, 2021 [9 favorites]

I think the best thing you can do is to print out the entire thesis -- either single-sided on paper, or to a pdf if you have a tablet; paper is probably better even if you do have a tablet because you can spread out your pages and look at more than one of them at once. (Make sure page numbers are turned on.) Then block out a few days with as-minimal-as-possible interruptions, sit down (ideally somewhere other than your usual computer workstation), and read through the entire thing with a red pen in hand. For the first pass, focus on structure and flow (you can deal with typos later); if a paragraph needs to go somewhere else, mark it and number it and put the corresponding number in the place where it needs to be moved to. If something needs to be expanded on or reworded, take a first shot at composing it right there in the margin (double-spacing could be your friend here). Do this for the whole document. Only then go back to your computer and implement all these changes.

[While I'm a LaTeX fan, I doubt that it makes sense for you to convert everything to LaTeX in the 3 months before you submit (unless your references section is totally out of control and needs a serious intervention, in which case I'd suggest considering it -- in that case Overleaf is probably the most user-friendly and platform-independent starting point).]
posted by heatherlogan at 6:58 AM on February 5, 2021 [1 favorite]

Hello. I was in grad school from 2003 to 2009 and did a PhD. Since then, I've worked in academia, industry, and now am a government research scientist. I write a mixture of dissertation-length (as in similar to your 60-80 pages) reports and academic papers as my full time job. In my field (geology), Word is still the default for manuscripts, but in my partner's field (economics), latex sometimes wins, especially for tables and graphs. However, almost all journals want word or pdf for track changes. Your field may vary?

I would strongly recommend just sticking with Word. It can be annoying, but if you get used to styles/headings etc., you can get past it. There's no point changing now if you submit in the spring. Your chapters being a bit disjointed at this point are likely due to them actually being disjointed, rather than the software you are using. That's ok! That's good! At least they are written (ahem, unlike me...) Unless you have supervisors who don't do track changes, then Word tends to be the easiest option.

Get into using styles/headings/templates and you can still write in different documents if you want. you can then get comments on different chapers from different people. I often do this (mostly because my work involves A LOT of diagrams, and that can mess up word*. If your institution has a template/guidance (it should do for any Masters), use that - if not, just be consistent.

you can pull the chapters together at the end. If your doc doesn't have lots of figures, it should work fine to keep them all together at 60 - 80 pages and refs. if you want any help merging documents please memail me, i'd be happy to help.

BTW, it's good you are using a reference manager, but if you get a variety of comments from your supervisors, and have to make a few manual changes, it's not the end of the world. I got really snarled up in getting endnote perfect during my phd sub, and it was actually quicker just to go in and change stuff even if wasn't a physical submission...


*I know it's not perfect, and I was a huge linux/latex person in my earlier years... but, academia is collaborative, and you need to be able to work in the most shareable formats. concentrate on your work and not on the software and you will do well! most people are familiar with track changes and commenting and if you have material for them in advance will try to comment.
posted by sedimentary_deer at 8:04 AM on February 5, 2021 [1 favorite]

I use Scrivener for pretty much all of my academic writing, but I agree that it might not make sense to jump in at the point where you are.

Why It Might Help
Functionally, what I like about Scrivener is the ability to see the structure of the writing via the notebook on the side. It means that I can set up how I think the paper is likely going to be structured and then easily keep in mind that structure as I focus on individual sections. It also makes it very, very easy to reorganize by dragging the sections around and renaming things. You can have sub-sub-sub sections, so you can go into greater detail on the structure than you might be interested in having actual headers for. You can also view the writing as either individual sections, or set it to show all of them together as a single document (helpful when working on transitions).

So, if you are having issues with trying to fit what you have into a clearer structure, this might help.

Why It Might Not Help
There is always a point where I have to start transferring the work to Word for formatting, perhaps to share or to start preparing to submit. At that point, I'll usually make a feeble attempt to continue making edits in Scrivener, but honestly the jump over is just annoying enough that it's not worth doing it multiple times. (For me this annoyance is especially compounded in that I use Bookends and have to compile and clean up the reference list repeatedly, so it might not apply for you as much as it does for me.)

So, if you are needing to send drafts and make edits to formatting as you go, I think it might not be worth it. In that case, you might want instead to consider putting in headers at various levels, maybe way more headers than you plan to keep, and turning on the table of contents menu on the side of the word documents. This would make it easier to see the structure and to jump around in the document. You'd still have to manually move chunks of text instead of the drag and drop functionality of Scrivener, but it might make it easier to at least see and think about your structure.

You got this!
posted by past unusual at 8:05 AM on February 5, 2021 [5 favorites]

I started using Scrivener last year, and I loove it. I even started opening Scrivener projects to organize non-writing projects, like my departmental administrative duties. It's just a great way to organize a lot of documents. Scrivener and Zotero have been the two writing tools that have proven indispensable to me.
posted by umbú at 8:28 AM on February 5, 2021

Chiming in to say that I've used Scrivener in exactly the same way as past unusual. It's great for the initial draft (or very substantial rewrite), when you're figuring out the structure of the paper and filling in each section. After that stage, when you're happy with the overall organization and you're sharing with people or going back and forth with co-authors (which I guess you won't be doing in a dissertation), it's easier to just stay in Word.

Whether it's worth switching right now in your particular case, I think it really depends on how much the current setup feels like a roadblock to you. In my experience, I have found it helpful to import a particularly painful manuscript draft that needed major rewrites into Scrivener - it gave me a fresh perspective and let me feel more in control of it. YMMV?
posted by omnie at 8:49 AM on February 5, 2021 [1 favorite]

I (an academic librarian who has mostly worked with grad students, who also has an academic SO) would strongly recommend following ChuraChura's advice. You are currently at the stage where organization seems daunting and a software fix sounds like a silver bullet, but no one piece of software will make you more organized, and learning new software risks distracting you from your job. If you weren't already using a reference manager, I'd recommend that, but Zotero's gotcha covered. I would work on organizing what you've got: get your metadata in order, be consistent in where you file things and how you name them.

Everyone's different, and I know several established academics who use Scrivener, and at least two who use Latex. You could be the type of person who can switch gears mid-project and benefit from switching to such a tool. But take it from someone who's seen 10-20 doctoral students wrestle with this exact question - this is most likely something to check out when you start your next project, not in the middle of this one.
posted by aspersioncast at 11:13 AM on February 5, 2021 [2 favorites]

I’ve heard anecdotally that many people who want the structural flexibility of Scrivener but find it overwhelming do well with Ulysses. Plus it can do the whole ‘export to a bajillion formats’ thing that Scrivener and LaTeX do. I’ve played around with it and it is pretty nice.
posted by Happy Dave at 12:44 PM on February 5, 2021

I do want to validate you by saying that every academic I know, including myself, has had this exact thought halfway through some project, usually a big one. But this is not something I would suggest tackling by learning a new platform. Use Microsoft Word, get comfortable with using Styles to format your headings, and then keep the Navigation sidebar open to navigate the document and to see how it's organized. Word is not perfect but it's pretty standard in academia; I've been here 12 years and everyone I collaborate with uses it. I teach most of my doctoral students to use styles and headings in Word, and most have them have not encountered it before -- the interface is very complicated and powerful, but you have to know how to use it to your advantage. Sometimes I also use Outline view in Word, but I find that to be most useful early in the writing process, when I am still shifting around my main concepts.

Reverse outlining can be useful if you are having trouble with structure: take your document and summarize each paragraph as a bullet point in a nested outline. I do this by hand but you could do it in a new document. Read through this outline to look for any missing links in the logical progression of your argument.
posted by k8lin at 1:16 PM on February 5, 2021 [3 favorites]