I’ve had Scrivener for some time, and played around with it, but not very seriously. In the last week I decided to use it as the primary tool for developing 3 course outlines for faculty of education courses I’m teaching this fall. In the past, I would’ve used Microsoft Word.
My subjective appraisal is that using Scrivener reduced the amount of development time by about 50% and allowed me, through the outline like environment, to try variations of lesson sequences and make revisions easily and quickly.
My workflow involved the following:
-
Saving a course outline template provided by the University in word format as an rtf file.
-
Importing that file into Scrivener and splitting the pieces to match the numbered sections in the course outline. This meant that I did not have to type any of the boilerplate text that is standard to all course outlines. I even used Scrivener tables to describe specific components of my course. There were a few problems until I discovered that adding a blank row to the bottom of a table cleared up some issues with navigating text in the table, selecting text and moving the cursor to where I wanted it.
-
Developing the course outline in Scrivener.
-
Compiling the Scrivener version of the course outline as an rtf file.
-
Opening that file in Word and cleaning up the formatting to produce the final document.That meant removing extraneous blank lines; adjusting the gridlines in the tables; and figuring out how deal with some text that somehow got bulleted in the conversion.
As an added bonus, I was able to use DragonDictate on my Mac to dictate a good portion of the text and this forum entry. The newest version of their software seems quite speedy and bug free. 