Five Essentials Tutorial

On November 1 Scrivener 2 for the Mac was released. Currently Scrivener for Windows is under development and will likely be released in January or February of 2011.

Several faculty in the School of Education are getting Scrivener and I've created a tutorial mainly for them, but anyone is welcome to download and use this tutorial. The tutorial covers, at least for me, the five essential features you want to know about Scrivener. In essence this tutorial presents why someone would use Scrivener rather than being a how to tutorial.

Perhaps the most important concept to understand is that Scrivener creates a writing environment rather than being simply "writing software." The distinction is important and I think becomes clear once you've viewed the tutorial.

Here are the five big areas covered:

• Chunking
• Organizational Flexibility
• Integrated Research
• Compiling (Exporting)
• Meta-Data

Realistically there are several other important features about Scrivener—and what I list as the big five may not be the same for everyone. However, this 22 minute tutorial does provide a decent overview for academics wanting to get started with Scrivener. The download is about 135 Mb, and the movie will play fine on your iPad (sync via iTunes) as well as your computer.

scrivener 2 essentials movie download