My simple request is so basic that it appears to fall outside any of the instructional material offered by Scrivener. On my MacBookPro I’m unsure how to select sections of text inside the Editor mode, and shift them to another part of the same document. I feel a clown for having to ask such a basic question, but would appreciate somebody humouring me with help. All I see in the manual are more complex examples involving shifting material between documents. Thanks in advance. Dougal
I do a Command X (cut) and Command V (paste).
You mention drag and drop in the post title: it should work fine within the Editor (it’s a standard MacOS feature, I think).
Just make sure you do it in two distinct actions: select the text, then release the mouse, then click and hold on the selection and drag it. If you’re too quick between the two steps, it sometimes doesn’t take.
If you hold the Option key down while you do it, it will Copy the text instead. There are a couple of wrinkles: eg if you drag the selection to the Binder it will create a new document.
HTH.
To obviate the speed issue highlighted by brookter, you can lock the selected text–and thereby move it more rapidly–by holding down the CMD key after making the selection.
Slàinte mhòr.
Basic text movement, both inside of a single binder item and between them, are covered in §15.3.3, Moving and Copying Text Around. But I think everything in that bullet list has already been covered by the helpful responses above. 
Thanks for the responses.
I to am having a frustrating problem with drag and drop of text. When I highlight the text with the mouse, unclick and click again, I have to wait 15 seconds before the text will drag. If I attempt to drag the text before that, it “unhighlights” the text and I have to highlight it again.
I have tried to click the command key as suggested, but it does not make a difference. This does not happen when I’m draging files in the binder outline, only when I highlight and try to drag and drop text from both within the editor and moving text outside of the editor into the binder outline.
I’m working on my disseration and the problem seems to get worse the longer the document. Any suggestions as what to do would be appreciated.
It looks like I may have solved the problem. I deleted the preference files as suggested here:
scrivener.tenderapp.com/help/kb … references
That seems to have solved the problem.