Scrivener

I have finally finished the course work for my master's degree in American literature and am beginning work on my thesis. I've already done quite a bit of research and have written a few shorter papers on the same topic. As a result, before I even began this semester I had a couple of folders full of information. They're a bit overwhelming and a bit disorganized, so I haven't looked at these folders in a while.

Last week I came upon Scrivener, and I am very impressed by all of its capabilities. I've gone through the rather lengthy tutorial, and I'm enthusiastic about jumping into all my old research now. The software will allow me to bring together all my research and previous writings so that I can move easily through them. It will help me maintain a handle on the whole project with labels and synopses for each section, it will allow me to move and change items while maintaining snapshots of the original, and it will display outlines and notecards for the entire project section by section.This is just the tip of the iceberg. I downloaded the trial version and plan on creating my project tomorrow.

What makes me nervous is the formatting. The master's thesis has very particular formatting guidelines, so I'm a little nervous about creating all of this in a program that I'm unfamiliar with and that flat out states it is not intended for formatting. While it does have some formatting capabilities, I'm not sure how much control I'll have in that area. Supposedly I'll be able to export the document into Word and format it from there. The thing is, I know Word and all its capabilities. I even attended a workshop on how to use Word specifically for creating this document. If every piece of technology works like it should (cross my fingers), I can have the best of both worlds. If, however, the formatting from Scrivener creates a wierd template effect or destroys the footnotes or the section breaks, I could end up having to redo the project when I get to Word. That's the worst case scenario, of course, but I find it better to hope for the best and prepare for the worst when dealing with new technology.

(Images from Literature and Latte - Scrivener website.)