So I do a lot of my thinking through the act of writing where my ideas start to really coalesce.

This is not a bug, it’s a feature!
It took me a long time to figure that out, especially having come to the humanities from the sciences, where first you collect data, then you analyze data, then you know something and can write it down. But I’ve definitely come to realize that very often, that “analysis” step really seriously does happen by means of writing. It’s still counterintuitive to me, but I’ve learned to embrace it and give myself credit for this kind of writing as a particular type of work that is really important.

I have *just* installed Scrivener (on the 30 day trial) and Zotero, and am excited about trying them out. I’ve been writing lots of little short papers on everything I’m reading, and am hopeful that Scrivener will help me with the analysis and synthesis work.

I’ve been using Scrivener for drafting and doing the formatting in Word to meet my uni guidelines. To be honest, do try the 30 day free version of Scrivener to see how it works for you. In my experience it took a little while to get my head around it since I’ve been conditioned to use the Word interface BUT the benefits are great. I keep meaning to write a more detailed blog post on it (soon) but for now, it’s an efficient and effective way of organising your drafts.

I know when I wrote my thesis (submitted end of 2010 which feels like a lifetime ago now!) it wasn’t until right at the end (like, scarily close to the end!) that I had it in thesis form, particularly the 3 findings chapters. I had everything written, but it wasn’t until that rarefied moment right at the end where those chapters finally fell into place. For me the issue was structural rather than creating the words per se, and it ended up being one of those cartoon ‘lightbulb moments’ where there was a sudden realisation of what should go where. Which was a bit stressful, but I suppose my point is that what is important is that I had at least got everything (more or less) written, had plugged away getting it nearly-but-not-quite right, and got there in the end, needing only minor corrections in the end. So what you’re doing – writing-as-thinking, getting *something*, *anything* down is absolutely not wasted effort, even if the point where it suddenly looks like a thesis may be a way away yet.

I’m hearing all sorts of things about Scrivener and Evernote and how they are both supposedly really helpful at the ‘just writing stuff’ stage before putting it together in linear fashion in Word; I’m very tempted to download and try them as I think that having various versions in Word was really hard to keep track of and didn’t help the writing process much.