Trapping "filter words," or how to tell Scrivener to flag proper words

Greetings, all.

I am trying to improve my writing, which requires me to be more mindful of certain “filter” words; verbs that tell rather than show a reader. Words like “felt.” There are a few dozen I’ve been advised to cull from my novel-writing vocabulary.

I’m looking for a way to tell Scrivener to flag these words as I write, so I can find an alternate way to write the passage. The Scrivener FB group has given a few less helpful tips (just don’t write them, use the Wordle feature or otherwise find overused words, etc. The only promising option I can see is rely on ProWritingAid (PWA) to identify the words in post. But since I “draft, edit, polish” and use PWA in polish, that’s a bit late in the process for me. I would rather handle it in draft.

Suggestions?

I suggest you ignore that advice, or at least, follow it in moderation. That said, I can put a list of those words in a text file and create a macro in Keyboard Maestro that detects and highlights them as I write. If you want to pursue that option, I can show you how in a Zoom session (free of charge).

one on one assistance

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I’ll +1 on that.
My opinion is that if it comes to you naturally as you are composing and actually need to be in a state of mind where things come naturally and spontaneously, that’d be the worst of all possible time to “worry” about it.
Let it be.
Make that a step at rewrite/revision.
Use Find once done with your first and second draft. Keep that rewriting for the end.
(Chances are over time, from revisions and revisions, you’ll just naturally stop – or do less of it ; develop an alternative reflex – without even thinking about it, in your early drafts. But now’s not quite the time.)

My two cents.

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Thanks. I’ll explore Maestro, but I was hoping there was a Scrivener-only solution at hand.

I have four novels out, and working on releasing another four this year. Looking to level up a bit during my drafting phase.

I’m at 20 Books Vegas right now, so I am exposed to a lot of free flowing advice. The best piece of advice is something I give outside of writing: “Do what works best for you. Try something out and keep it if it adds value, otherwise shed.”

I’ve found I can put out 1,000 wph while “rewriting” as I go in draft mode. My ADHD mind will ruminate on a poorly written passage and my wph drops if I don’t revise. During my “true” revision phase I may add 10% more to a given section. Then I use PWA to pick up on gaffs during the polish.

(If it helps, when I was in law school I could put down about 2400 wph of tight legal prose, with editing.)

There are a dozen “filter” words to be kept aware of. Per the presenter…not that you can’t use the word, but one must be judicious. All I want to do is flag the filter words so I am mindful of whether to rewrite or ignore the advice for that passage. If I could have Scrivener flag the word as “misspelled,” then

Edit/Find/Project search :
image

You could also use project auto-completion so a popup comes and annoys you when in the process of typing one of these words…

…Or use @drmajorbob solution if it highlights those words right away. (Probably your best bet here, in this case.)

This kind of capability is something we get asked about now and then. While there isn’t a dedicated feature specifically for doing this, there is a larger general purpose tool which very closely provides what you want—and at the same time is capable of much more beyond that: Project Search. You may have encountered the feature before, but there are some tricks that can make it work well for this purpose—and yes, that includes RegEx support, which can do some interesting things such as finding duplicate words.

I do often require something along the lines of what you are describing (I tend to abuse “just” and “simply”!), and so I’ll share how I do that along with some variations you might find more appealing than what I do myself—meaning that out of all of this description below there is likely one concise approach you could take that once set up would involve extremely little overhead on your part to switch in and out of this “highlight mode”.


Setting Up Search

First, with some initial setup:

  1. Use the Edit/Find/Search in Project menu command, or click the magnifying glass in the toolbar.

  2. In the search bar that will appear above the binder, type in the word(s) you wish to highlight. You might want to also click on the magnifying glass button to the left of the typing area and hone the options here. For example, to only include matches found within the Draft folder, in “Text” (rather than Titles, Keywords, etc.).

    I often want to highlight multiple words at once. This can be easily done by changing the operator to Any Word. One could dump an entire list of words they overuse and wish to avoid into a search like this.

Now you’ve got a concise list of all documents that contain the words in the sidebar, and each instance of the word highlighted for you in the main editors. You can either have Scrivener retain those highlights as you edit the text or remove them. The option for that is, Typing clears search highlights in the Editing: Options preference pane (and by the way the search highlight colour and underscore decoration can be customised in Appearance: Textual Marks: Colors).

If you intend to have this on while writing, you will obviously want to keep that option off.

Refreshing the Highlights

Like me, you’ll probably want to refresh the highlights from time to time, once you’ve sprinted past the rough draft burst. This is easy to do: use the shortcut to move the cursor into the search field (Edit/Find/Project Search), and hit Return.

Read more about Project Search in the user manual, section §11.1.

Preserving the Search as a “Highlight Mode”

The next thing to do is to make it so you never have to do that again. :slight_smile: We will save this search for future use and later recall it with a single click or command:

  1. Click on the magnifying glass menu to the left of the search tool typing area again.
  2. Select the “Save Search as Collection…” option at the very bottom.
  3. Name it whatever you like, and click OK.
  4. You’ll note the sidebar changes colour and the header for it switches to using your name.

Read more about this in §10.2.4—and also this Collections section in general if you are not familiar with the feature.

To recall this search in the future, there are a few easy ways to do so:

  • Use View ▸ Show Collections to reveal the collection tab list. Now the binder, your saved searches and the last search you ran are all available via single-click.

  • Use the Navigate ▸ Collections ▸ submenu to jump straight to your saved search at any time. This is the method I prefer.

    Mac only: this can be optimised further by adding custom keyboard shortcuts pointing directly to common collections. For example one pointing to “Navigate->Collections->Binder” is generally useful, but if I standardise on this concept throughout all of my projects, I could set up a shortcut for “Navigate->Collections->Hot Words”, too.

As a bonus, you can use this saved search as a springboard for highlighting other words as you require. When you load a saved search collection, its settings are loaded into the project search tool, meaning you can refine how it works by changing the word you are searching for, or other settings.

Windows note: at the time of this writing there is a bug where changing the search term while viewing a search collection modifies the collection’s search term.

Browsing the Draft without the Sidebar

Now you have a good way to highlight your draft at will, but you might want to navigate more freely within the draft—with the search result sidebar you can only see those portions of it that contain highlighted terms, and replacing the sidebar with the full binder will exit search mode and remove the highlights. This will also be important if you want to have words highlighted while you are writing, rather than as a retrospective tool, as you will more likely than not be wanting to create new items without having to back out to the binder and then load the search again.

There are a few different approaches you can take here.

A Dedicated Window Layout

  • Split the editor and use one side for navigation, probably as an outliner view, but that’s up to you. For example:

    1. Click the split view button on the far right side of the editor header bar.
    2. Use the Navigate ▸ Go To ▸ Draft menu command.
    3. Optionally, set the Navigate ▸ Outliner Selection Affects ▸ Other Editor menu toggle to make it load what you click on in the other split automatically (like the binder works).

    If you like this approach you might want to save it as a layout (see Window ▸ Layouts ▸ Manage Layouts; and while there, note some of the built-in layouts might even work well for you without having to do the above setup by hand).

  • If you already use splits extensively, you can turn one split into a navigation tool all by itself:

    1. Use the Navigate ▸ Open ▸ in Copyholder menu command. This will open the currently edited document into the copyholder for the current split.
    2. With the keyboard focus in the main editor (not its copyholder), use the Navigate ▸ Go To ▸ Draft menu command.
    3. Toggle the Navigate ▸ Outliner Selection Affects ▸ Copyholder menu toggle.

Simple Editor Navigation

But if all of that sounds like a lot of setup, you can also efficiently navigate around using nothing but the editor itself in conjunction with keyboard navigation shortcuts—this is incidentally more what I tend to do, I treat the editor very much like a hybrid navigation/text editor. A few tips:

  • The Navigate ▸ Go To ▸ Enclosing Group menu command (⌃⌘R / Win+Ctrl+R): moves “up” from the document you are editing into the group it comes from. This can help in switching to different items and creating new ones.
  • ⌥⌘O / Alt+Shift+O: loads the selected item from the outliner/corkboard into the main editor.
  • ⌘[ and ⌘] / Ctrl+[ and Ctrl+] go forward and backward in history.
  • And it’s worth noting that you can always press ⌘N / Ctrl+N while writing to create a new text item after the one you’re currently working within. This works from Scrivenings mode as well.
  • I also use the Quick Search tool a lot (the URL looking field in the main toolbar), to jump around between things I know the name of.

One way or another you can get around within your entire draft inside the editor, thus leaving the binder sidebar in search mode the entire time. In general, Chapter 12 on Project Navigation has a lot of value for getting the most out of the editors.

Let me know if you have specific implementation questions with any of the above.

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Thanks, Amber. I see the highlighting does not show up as I type (preferred). But, after I finish the section then using collection gives me what I’m looking for.

The following is the regex I’m starting with:

felt|feel|could|can|decide|experience|heard|hear|looked|noticed|noted|realized|saw|seemed|sounded like|thought|touched|woundered|was able to|watched

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I take it you are on the Mac version in that case, as that is indeed an unfortunate side-effect of how this tool works there. You do need to refresh periodically, and if you prefer shortcuts you can use the one that puts the cursor into the search field and then hit Return to refresh, then Ctrl+Tab to get back to the main editor.

I will admit that this technique was developed from the standpoint of review, rather than what feels to my like software wagging a finger while I’m in the flow—same reason I turn off spell check while typing.

Wondering if you meant something else…

Thanks for the peer review. :slight_smile:

Yes to Mac version. I bought my first Mac to use Scrivener (first licensed Scrivener in May 2010), and prefer it over Windows (otherwise I’d be on Linux).

I tend not to like the finger wagging either. I do prefer not to have a misspelled word when I can help it even in draft. I’ll ruminate if I know it’s wrong and google it if I have to. But, drafting the section then immediately going back to revise with highlights is a fair compromise. Eventually, I’ll train those terms out of my writing.

Thanks again! :slight_smile:

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As part of a Scriviner default, Is there a way to set a list of words to automatically highlight when such words or parts of words are used? Example, I write a chapter 1 and move to the second chapter. When I go back to edit chapter one, is there a way to set up a macro in scrivener automatically highlight every ‘but’ without me having to do the search and keep it searching for the highlight to stay?

It happens to people that words are highlighted without them knowing these words still reside in the project search textbox. So, yes it should be possible…

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Have a look at this guide, above. Saved search collections are essentially the answer to what you are looking for. While ‘but’ might be the thing you want to look for now, you can keep adding to that list as time goes by, increasing the effectiveness of it.

This is beautiful. One last question, is it possible to move the project searchs you set up from project to project, I’m on the windows version.

There is no way of copying or dragging Collections between project binders. However since the ingredients are so simple, it’s pretty easy to make a new search and copy and paste the word list from one to another, then save it.

If this is something you do want everywhere you go, while it doesn’t solve the present tense, do consider that Project Templates save everything about a project, including their collections. That’s how I handle it anyway! I’ve got a “hot list” collection that comes with every new project I make.

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Hello, I think that it could be very nice to use the focus command for specific words as well. Sometimes it can be helpful to see on the page the occurrence of a repeated word by a character.

You can achieve this by hitting ⌘F (on Mac) (⌃F on Windows, I assume) and writing the word you are looking for. Switch back to the text. All occurences will be highlighted and you’ll be able to jump from one to the next using ⌘G and ⇧⌘G.

Is this close to what you were looking for?

I am sorry, but no. It seems that it highlight one instance at a time, instead I’d like to see all of them higlighted.

My bad. You actually need to hit Edit > Find > Search in Project which is ⇧⌘F for me.