I need a feature which I hope Scrivener has, but can’t find.
I am writing dialog for a character that is British, but being a “Yank” means that I need to have someone review the dialog for authenticity.
I would like to tag or mark all the dialog for that character to make it easier for a reviewer to focus on the relevant text.
Apart from highlighting that text, is there a better way to do this?
TNX
One way would be to set up a Style for this (and a keyboard shortcut for the style). You’d want the Style to use the same formatting as the main text but coloured. So you would do it like this:
Select some dialogue.
Colour it.
Go to Format > Styles > New Style From Selection…
Choose to make it a character style (and probably turn off font and font size).
Choose a number for its shortcut. You can then use Opt-Cmd+[number] to use the style whenever you type some dialogue.
Then, when you Compile for your reader, you can override the style to be a different format if you want. You don’t even have to colour it in the text (skip (2) above) and just colour it during the Compile phase. Once your reader has checked it, you can use the Styles panel to select all text of that style and then remove the style.
All the best,
Keith
Thank you. That may work better than simply highlighting everything then having to go back and fix each one.
You also might want to experiment with making the style a paragraph style. It’s easier to apply a paragraph style than applying a character style to specific bits of text. You only have to have your cursor somewhere in the paragraph to change its style, vs. having to highlight just the text between quotes.
Of course, the style would apply to dialogue tags, description, quote marks, etc…, but I imagine that wouldn’t be too much of a burden for your reviewer.
If you’re going back after the fact to mark up the dialog, you might find Edit > Writing Tools > Linguistic Focus… helpful. You can fade out all but the direct speech, so it will be a bit faster to skim through your existing text looking for the quotes belonging to the character, then select that text and apply the style per Keith’s suggestion.