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To write my capstone, I’ve been using Scrivener, a word processor designed to accommodate the planning and writing process of longer texts. Rather than scrolling through a long Word document, you can view individual sections of your longer document in any combination (you can also view your documents in a cork board, which I never really make use of). Scrivener is not a WYSIWG (what you see is what you get) processor, but rather separates the writing step from the formatting step in its workflow. While it’s not exactly a Plain Text editor, it does support MultiMarkdown, an expansion of sorts of the Markdown we’ve talked about in class. The separation of the writing step from the compiling step also makes it ideal to run your piece through a citation manager, like Zotero. On the note of citations and research, Scrivener also will house, if you so choose, the PDFs you’ve collected, and you can split panes within the software to view documents side by side. It also has some nifty features for creative writers (for instance, easy formatting tags for screenplays) that I, writing only criticism, don’t get the chance to use. I do, however, make use of its commenting features and composition mode. It is unfortunately a little pricey ($40), not that it’s much compared to the unsubsidized price of Microsoft Word or anything.
On the free side of life, I’ve been using a digital planner app called iProcrastinate to keep track of the rest of what I have to do. It’s designed for students, and it lets you organize assignments under different courses, rank them according to priority, and (satisfyingly) check them off when they’re finished. If you pay $2, you can also download the iOS app to sync with it.