WORDS ARE KING to writers - THEY ARE OUR #1 PRIORITY!

Scrivener Wish List
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I have posted this elsewhere on the In-Project Word List thread from 2018, but would like to throw it out there again in 2020.

It is just to say WORDS ARE KING to us writers, and that the tools for managing them SHOULD NOT BE A BOLTED-ON AFTERTHOUGHT.

EVERY writer will use words that are not in the standard spellchecker - whether they are writing about Thai Cuisine or Pet Care or Alien Invasions or Hobbit’s Feet Hair - WE NEED THE TOOLS TO ACCURATELY AND EFFICIENTLY CHECK AND MANAGE OUR WORDS AND GRAMMAR!!!

This is from the other thread:

"I strongly back the case for personalised in-Project Word Lists.

WORDS ARE OUR BUSINESS!!!

I am creating a whole universe with several THOUSAND non-standard words: lots of proper nouns of places and people and clans; lots of fantasy names for creatures and effects and artefacts; lots of religious terms in Greek, Latin and Sanskrit; and a whole lot beside! Not only do I want to be able to place these all in the Project, I also want to split them according to their type AND then create glossaries according to type.

This rings true for EVERY writer out there - fiction or non-fiction. New words and specialist jargon is rife in everything, as are proper nouns. I have been using Scrivener for less than a week and I am already adding pretty mundane standard words to its limited dictionary, let alone the thousands of my own devising!

I WILL SAY AGAIN: WORDS ARE OUR BUSINESS and without proper vocabulary management tools and grammar checkers, Scrivener is falling way short of my expectations despite the glowing plaudits it receives elsewhere.

Tools to enable the accurate use and management of ALL WORDS should sit at the heart of the software, NOT be some peripheral add on with throw-away excuses towards platform limitations and the like. It is overcoming those sorts of poor excuses that inspired Scrivener’s creation, so it is time to realise THE WORDS ARE KING."

I am not interested in people like devinganger making tech-sounding excuses - computers are General Purpose Machines, mate, THEY ARE ONLY LIMITED BY THE PEOPLE WHO DEVELOP THEM!!!

1 Like
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I really wish you had let the past stay the past instead of dragging me into your rant by name. However, I will merely offer you the blessing of Ecclesiastes 10:12-14.

Have a nice day.

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Do you practice what you preach? Don’t need no Chapter and Verse citation for that one, it is pretty universal.

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Tkd eorfk sdlfig asmco orgjv asdof-ksdjf mzv,fgk.

Or something.

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I see you’ve had an email from my four year old grandmunchkin :laughing:

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Easy for you to say.

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Scrivener doesn’t know the words, and I’m baffled as to what to do next.

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please don,t do that.

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Star Trek’s Klingon, Avatar’s Na’vi, Lord of the Rings’ Quenya, Sindarin…
So why not?

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Nobbo,

I like your idea. If L&L implemented something like this, I would make use of it.

But please stop with the all caps shouting. This makes you come across like a petulant child stomping its foot, and does your argument no favors.

Best,
Jim

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Reminds me of Usenet and the Dark Tower, actually…

“See the TURTLE of Enormous Girth…”

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One of my favourite book series of all time, up to and including (chronologically speaking) The Wind through the Keyhole. I thought the last three were pretty rushed and poor in comparison. But what an ending.

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two of those are tv/movie settings where the created languages are designed to flit by in a few moments and are never actually dwelled upon or intended to be understood. the actor conveys the meaning through emotion, but it,s either meant to be glossed over, or it,s translated via subtitles/actual liveaction translation.

if you look at lotr – how many made up words actually are there. names, sure. places, obviously. but you have to do a fair bit of reading to find them.

i,d have been more impressed if you,d used the examples of lewis carroll or the absolutely delightful walter moers, but again, with the exception of the very short work of jabberwocky, how many new words did they actually use between them, and how frequently were they deployed.

let,s do some maths on the scenario proposed by our young hero. let,s conservatively say that thousands of new words means two thousand – the smallest number that logically fits that description. in a 50,000 word novel , assuming the words are actually used – otherwise why bother – that means at least 1 word in every 25 is made up. let,s say that each word is used at least twice – again otherwise why bother inventing a word, and my scrivener stats on word frequency say that 3-6x is pretty standard for the more obscure words in a novel length manuscript so 2x is conservative… that means that actually 1 in every 12ish words is made up. that,s roughly 1 a sentence.

how tiring would that book be to read.

go back and compare that to lotr – how many sentences do you go through before you come to an invented word that isn,t a place or character name. let,s make it easier… how many pages. or is it actually chapters.

my advice – don,t do it. it,s a lot of effort for something that you,re bound to overuse. just write in the language your reader speaks. after you,ve finished your first draft, if you still think that the manuscript would be improved with some colourful elements then go back and tastefully add.

unless you, re walter moers

tl;dr – please don,t do that

1 Like
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@Floss - Excellent analysis! I’d add A Clockwork Orange to your list of works which leverage invented words. That said, it’s been years since I’ve read it, and perhaps Burgess didn’t invent quite as many as I remember.

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Your personal opinion is totally irrelevant. You may not enjoy it and/or find it difficult to read but that’s just you. Some people love it. Let the OP write what his heart desire.

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Well, Tolkien was a trained linguist, so probably more capable of inventing coherent languages than many of the people who have attempted it. And he still inflicted pages and pages of bad Elvish poetry on his readers. I love LOTR, but there are definitely parts that would have benefited from a more skeptical editor.

With that said, the wisdom of the OP’s idea really isn’t relevant to his suggestion, and there’s no need to critique it in this thread.

On the other hand, adding tools capable of managing thousands of invented words would certainly be a large and challenging task, and probably only of interest to a relatively small number of users. The OP might be wise to consider other tools rather than waiting for Scrivener to implement this.

Katherine

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i,m sure you,re right.
thank you for correcting me.

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Or just create glossaries as Scrivener documents and spell-check them, pressing Alt-A to add as needed. And recognize that no grammar checker will process all that custom lingo. Course preemptively and categorically battling away suggestions conveys they’d fain lament the darkness with illumination at hand.

Rgds - Jerome

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Found this while doing a search for “how best to create/manage glossaries in a project”.

While I tend to agree that the excessive use of invented language/words can become a bit of a vice for a writer, there is the question of uncommon technical terms that need definition within a work. Nearly every trade/profession/field has its own terms, and sometimes those terms are the same words used by others for totally different purposes and meanings.

Being able to build a glossary for these specialized terms in order to clarify precisely what the author means would not be a totally useless and edge-case function within a piece of software like Scrivener. For someone doing technical writing, I dare say it would be an essential feature, along with “build index”.

I’m at least trying to figure out how best to structure what I’m writing in order to make export to an actual DTP program as simple as possible, and I’m not finding any “best practices” anywhere in the manual. Also, not having a hell of a lot of luck finding much that is on-center here in the forums. If anyone has the time and the experience with these issues, I’d appreciate them chiming in…

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If I needed a glossary, I would use a Glossary sub-folder in my Binder and add one document to it for each term. That should be completely adequate for up to a few dozen terms. For hundreds or thousands, you might want a specialized dictionary tool.

Katherine