Software Tools for Writing Projects

hi my name is Alex Palecek my nickname is Sasha and I will be presenting on software tools for writing projects today um I have a set of keynote slides that I’m going to be using during the presentation and I’ll be reading from a script from time to time so if your paper rustling that’s probably why and I’m also going to be showing you some specific software tools for and all that I think can be really helpful in approaching writing projects and a variety of tasks I have about five tasks that I’ll tell you about that I think are important to think about when you’re choosing a software that you might use in your writing process and there’s something about writers there are kind of two classes of writers there are planners we would like to plan everything in advance and sort of make an outline and then fill it in with detail and unknown advance what the map is and then sort of discover the writing territory and those people are called planners as a class and the other class of people and it’s called Panthers because they like to fly by the seat of their pants they just get in there and write some stuff down and then later on find out if there’s there’s any kind of linear format or hierarchy that emerges from just getting in there and getting started and whether you’re a planner or a pantser hopefully these software tools will have something to offer to you a little bit about me before we get started um my interest in software tools for writing stems from a couple of sources last year I was writing fellow at the CI is Center for writing and scholarship that’s at the California Institute of integral studies and so part of the fellowship program was training in academic writing and then actually helping students one-on-one with their study skills and with the specific demands of academic writing so we would meet in session and there was also a sort of a workshop format that we would do we would bought multiple people to come and learn about writing and write together and for that project actually um designed I research designed and developed a mindful writing curriculum to trying to integrate mindfulness practice and skills on one hand with the writing process and yeah then seeing how these two things can support each other so that was part of what I did during the fellowship here and I also have a background in actually being a writing or a computer consultant since I was about 13 I’ve spent time working with people one-on-one and in groups helping them to use computers so rather than letting computers use you we should find ways that you can use computers and that it should be as easy and straightforward and as pleasurable as possible so those are the two kind of background pieces I bring to the writing and software side of things and in terms of my own research as a doctoral student in East West psychology at CIS I’m going to be writing a dissertation that looks at mindfulness and psychotherapy and bipolar disorder one of my research goals is to come up with a new sort of psychotherapy approach integrating contemplative psychotherapy and mindfulness practice as well as some other things and what I found when I was getting into it is that there’s so much research and literature out there and so many ideas that I couldn’t manage it all on my own just thinking about it there’s just way too much information so part of what I needed to do was find out ways to store that information and then find ways to transfer it into a written format and so I ended up doing a lot of research into specific to software tools to do that and so the core of what I’m presenting it’s kind of for important software packages that I use to manage my dissertation writing process and that is the basic intro for how I got here and what I’m hoping to offer to you and oh and I also want to say that even if you’re not an academic writer if you’re writing for professional reasons or for creative writing reasons I think that these tools can still be helpful to you you don’t have to be an academic I think that they’re applicable for all kinds of things and anytime that we have a writing project the the tasks that I identify and potentially the software tools that I identify I could be useful to you and and even if these specific tools aren’t the ones that you end up choosing hopefully this webinar will inspire you to find tools that really do work for you so that you can design your own workflow for you okay um and then there is a Q&A; feature in the Google Hangouts app the people who are viewing live on and then I won’t be able to actually have time for the questions until the end so feel free to ask questions as we go along um there will be about 10 minutes the end the question-and-answer but I’m just going to be looking at slides are showing you slides and by demonstrating the software for the most of the center part so go ahead and ask questions using the Q&A; as we go along it all try to answer them um okay so that’s the basics so I’m gonna slip some switch to my slide show it’s very okay alright you said a little bit about this presentation software tools for writing projects then I’ll check my nickname is Sasha if you aren’t you can reach me at Alex Palecek comm why writing software well one good reason to use writing software is to stay organized there’s a lot of research there are a lot of ideas and there are lots of things that go into writing as a process and keeping things very nice can really be helpful in terms of making writing as friction-free as possible it will allow you to collect research and sources and find a way to store them and organize them and then use them later on in a way that works for you and it should help you to flexibly brainstorm one of the big tasks of writing is getting started and then once you’ve gotten started finding ways to move ideas around until they fit in the right way yeah writing software should reduce the cognitive load especially when you’re dealing with a lot of information it can be hard to think clearly about how it all fits together and writing software should do some of the heavy lifting of certain parts of the process so that you can focus on the writing itself and finally writing software should simplify the writing process as much as possible in this presentation I’ve identified five kinds of tasks that are necessary that software can help with the first is brainstorming and planning getting those ideas out there moving them around seeing how to connect and forming an overall plan for how you want to approach your writing project the second task is outlining which is a way of taking information and putting it in a hierarchical format so that you can see how different parts relate to each other in a linear way and if there’s an order and if there is a sort of a tree like structure and outlines can help with that collecting research is another important task that writing software can help with composing and managing writing projects there our software tools that can help you with all the different tasks of actually writing and then managing the project and finally citation management having sources and being able to cite them in a way that’s easy for you to approach these five kinds of tasks I have selected four pieces of software that I’m going to be talking about today these are scalpel notebook Scrivener and Zotero the first piece of software I’ll present on is scalpel scalpel is a visual spatial brainstorming and planning tool it allows you to arrange your thoughts in a free-form way on the page and find the connect choose between them so you can easily record your ideas and move them around until something that works comes to it and something I really like about scaffold is that it can be hierarchical or it can be freeform a lot of the mind mapping tools that are out there force you into using a hierarchy format but scalpel lets you it doesn’t make you do that basically it’s a lot more like writing on a whiteboard or a big piece of paper so let’s take a look at scalpel and see what it’s like so here I have a new scaffold document the first thing to know about scalpel is what it’s like to actually add a note it’s pretty simple you just double click so here’s my new note I’m going to call it the writing software webinar and then I just click off of the note to do you select it and if I want to create a new note I double click again something about he know that’s the presentations that I’m using so I’ve created these and then to link them I just drag one on to the other and then I let go and it creates this line here this connection and then I can move this one around and it stays connected so that it’s able to really be reorganized spontaneously if I want to create lines with arrows what I do is I drag and hold down a modifier key on Mac I hold down option and I let go and then there’s an arrowhead if I wanted to do the other way I would grab the other one is start with that and if I want to create a double-headed arrow and then grab the other I hold down the modifier queue and then do that so there we’ve got something like that it’s easy to move the font size up and down using command plus you can style text and make it bold or underline it and you can also change some of the color options on the page you can add what are called background shapes which are basically like boxes that contain other shapes and you can also scroll in and out on the screen here I’m going to do it by using my touchpad with the pinch or a reversed pinch and you’ll see that here it scales up quite a bit you can also use the zoom slider to zoom in very close and something I really like about scalpel is that it has a pretty big diagram space this is the maximal zoom out and if you check out the zoom in you’ll see that it’s pretty easy to move in and out and to make a big map with lots of connections you can also drag images into your scalpel map here that go on with this gentleman and some cats don’t drag in and another one with this adorable kitten can add in your background shape drag it around it I don’t you know to say cute kitten lips like a bold make it’s very and it’s so easy to connect these different items that I use scalpel as the beginning point for lots of my writing projects I actually used it to plan this webinar then here’s the first map that I made nice to talk about it so you’ll see it’s possible to get a lot of information out or down on the page and I build this up over time and so I started with an idea of some of the kind of main points that I wanted to cover which ended up being maybe these these titles here that I inserted and then I delineate the topic with these background shapes here I assembled I created a linked list that if you want you can go to my website later and read and link to some of these software products and as I was going I realized I needed to annotate that so in this case this just says Oh remember to link this um and um it’s basically just a really easy way especially for people who are visual thinkers like me to rapidly move from a free-form brainstorming place to something where you can really assemble some more structure and make things more workable so for me scalpel has been a really powerful tool and I really encourage you to check it out um it’s available for Mac and Windows and I think it’s about fifteen or twenty dollars and it’s pretty cool and maybe I’ll show you one more example of the scaffold file just to show you more about how things can get impressive to define this so um I was researching contemplatively and I came up with this map that connects all of these different articles it was a way for me to organize my thinking about these different articles there is a mindfulness there is a writing and theories of learning and pedagogy and then I even used it to sort of map a research idea so I wanted to design a class and also have it be based on research and then have a research method where I would deliver the class and then have a research outcome and this talked about sort of the outcomes so it’s a really flexible thing you can use it in all kinds of ways and yeah I really encourage you to give it a shot okay so that’s cool I’m gonna switch back to keynote for some more slides all right so next I’m going to present on notebook for outlining I’m gonna there will be a notebook segment for the next part too but here I’m going to be focusing on the hierarchy creation aspect of notebook so basically in outlining allows you to organize information hierarchically and then once you’ve done that and you’ve got it into sort of points and sub points and sub sub points you can easily show or hide the information and that’s helpful if you’re planning for example a long research paper or a long book or a allowing an involved process a project with lots of to do points and sub to do points what’s nice is that you can you can show or hide even most of a document if you want to focus just on one little piece because the vise is overwhelming and there’s too much information and another thing that outlining software is great for its clarifying the structure of the information so you’ve got a lot of information there and by putting it into different chunks that allows for the structure to come through so let’s take a look at notebook as now line tool so this is a basic notebook page let me show you what a new one looks like just you know just kind of pops up like that and you can make it be mind and change the font and all I’ve got stuff in this particular notebook you’ll see there’s the contents pane over here and it shows what all the contents are it mirrors this view here and here you’ll see is the hiding the showing and hiding then you keep read this and press this little triangle it’ll reveal or conceal the contents and I’ve set up a writing webinar demo here at this example page so I’ll click on that so you can go through and um here there are already a couple of example items I’ll just delete these so I can show you how easy it is on basically to create a new item you just hit return so this isn’t my new item and it create another new item new item too all right so now I have two items I hit return again and if I want to create a hierarchy I’m talking movement I just hit tab I hit tab in the end tabs and now it’s a child so to speak of the other one so here I’m going to make some sub points some point one point two sub point three and you’ll notice each new item it tabs to the same level of indentation as the prior item and now that these things are set up like this I can show or hide them right it’s also really easy to drag in other items I can drag in this JPEG of a hawker unicorn and if I just drag it in here it’s gonna create it I think in the highlighted item so just add the file I know I created a new item and if I want I can even drag it to make a little bit bigger and then I can hide this in one of these sub points like that so it was possible to pack a lot of information here but to present it in a way that’s relatively easy to use if we look at one of these weeks I used this particular notebook to take notes for one of my classes a couple semesters ago you’ll see this little standpoint theory item here if I show it there’s all of this stuff that’s open and I can choose which parts I want to show and which parts I don’t want to show and I can have multiple levels of depth to my outline so that basic functionality about outlining is what I wanted to point out about notebook and it’s also something that’s possible in the lots of different software so let’s go back to the slides to look at some other aspects of notebook specifically here for collecting research so another really important thing you want to be able to do for your writing probably is to gather in stored research research could be research articles it could be interesting quotes that you’ve read in some book it could be notes for your novel it could be images that inspire you or that are related to your topic you want to gather it and have it be sort of in a safe place and then once it’s in a safe place you want to be able to organize and understand it you can sort it in the themes you can see if there are links among different aspects and you might want to tag files for example in order to have easy access to them later on or you might want to just find on the name of an author so you should be able to search and preferably in multiple ways to find the information and then you also want to be able to get it back out again whether that’s for writing to make it an easy writing tool to work with or if you want to export it to another format in case you decide to move to a different platform or whatever down the road so let’s take a look at notebook for these gathering research functions and for this part I’d like to show you my total bibliography this is a place where I keep notes on all of the articles that I read for my dissertation so I read them and as I’m going I might have some opinions about it or I might want to write a synopsis or I might include annotations here this is a an article in narrative research I have the citation information here so it’s easier for me to know where it’s coming from I have a link to the PDF on my harddrive and then I have the page numbers and some quotes that I thought I might end up using later on in a paper that I’d write here’s an example of an article on bipolar disorder where I have a lot of annotations that I highlighted in the PDF and then I was able to just take those highlights and paste them right in to my notebook so I have everything alphabetized by the last name of the author and so it’s easy to find all that stuff basically there is a multi decks feature that’s really cool um where circus ponies notebook automatically creates different indices or different index with these different reasons so we can create it for keywords and created for text if I want to say oh how many mentions are there or the word above there are 32 in all of the tax that’s in this notebook and it can also do it for things like keywords I’ve created some keywords on some of these articles so here’s really easy and if I just click on it it’ll show me all of the articles that have attachments in this case okay and it’s also really easy to just do a find there’s a what’s called a super fine and circus ponies notebook and here is already populated with mindfulness because that was my last search we’re gonna go ahead and do that and then it’s gonna bring me to this super find results window it found a hundred six articles in the whole notebook and it reports each instance of the word mindfulness in context it shows me the words that are around and then it lists additional results on not following pages and if I want to go to that and it shows me what article it’s saying I can just click here and it jumps to it right in context and then if I’m gonna go back to the search results I can just hit back so it’s quite powerful and I also want to point out that notebooks don’t only have to be this sort of somewhat drab lined notebook and lots of sort of serious research stuff it can also be a little more fun and fanciful you can change the background color and drop in all kinds of things you can tilt photographs and style text and you can draw diagrams here’s an example of a diagram that I’ve drawn for my Zotero workflow which is one of the users talked what we’ll be talking about later on basically here I’ve done some outlining some sort of sketching things that it might do in scapular another to us here this is just to show that there are some drawing tools that are also part of circus ponies notebook circus Bernays notebook is the only piece of software in this lineup that is only available for Mac if you’re using Windows or Linux there’s some other good alternatives out there OneNote is a is one that can work for Mac and Windows they might want to look into and there’s also Evernote which is popular that’s a cloud based solution that people often use for creating these sorts of research collections and there’s more information on OneNote and Evernote and all of that stuff on my blog on my website with some links to things for this whole presentation you can check that out later if you want so let’s switch back to the slides and talk about Scrivener Scrivener is an integrated writing environment it’s maybe the first kind of software of its kind is really specialized towards writing long texts like a novel or thesis or dissertation or a book you can use it for other things too a managing blog post and stuff like that but it really excels for the longer project and part of what’s really nice about Scrivener it has lots of different tools that you can use but it doesn’t impose a writing process or a writing style for Panzers you can kind of just get in there and later on figure out the overall arc of the story and for planners you can create a pretty detailed outline and go from there fill it in and make it all fit so it’s quite powerful and rather than just talk about it I’d like to show you a little bit because that might communicate a little better about so here’s a basic Scrivener window I’ll just show you around a little bit here on the left side is a segment that’s called the binder and the binder is kind of like a table of contents that shows the structure of your project and allows you to keep tabs on everything and easily access all of the components of your project this central pane here the big white space is the composition area where you do your type and up here is the toolbar with easy to access commands there are also some commands that are in the menus that are not available in the toolbars although you can add them if you want and up here is a formatting bar if you want to use that kind of format so in terms of the basic advantage of Scrivener what Scrivener is unique for and and really makes it powerful for longer texts is its basic model is that of what they call it scribbling and and to explain that let me talk a little bit about word or other traditional word processors if you think about word and you’re working on a Word document it’s kind of like one long scroll typically there’s one window it’s a long it’s a long single scroll later on for printing and cuts it into pages but for the most part you’re working in scrolling back and forth between the bottom and the top and somewhere in the middle Scrivener takes a different approach to the written document on a computer which is that it actually breaks your document down into many small fragments I say it but really you do you’re able to break it down into many fragments and then Scrivener sort of glues them together in the order that you’ve dragged them let me show you an example here so here I’ve got this untitled document and I’m gonna hit command n to create a new document and they call this as Scriven II so I’m gonna call this driven ensue okay so this is my what we were just looking at is untitled I’m going to rename that scripting one and I just double click on it to rename it and then here I switch back to scribbling – so here’s typing some more all right typing some more for the webinar now up here in the View mode you’ll see there are three views if I click on the draft here it shows me everything that’s in that sub document everything that’s below draft it’s going to show me when I’m in this this group distributing mode so it shows me these two scripting sort of glued together and then if I compile for export it’s going to glue them together in the order that I want now if I want to rearrange the order of these in word you’d have to do something like take this cut it move to the top paste it but here what I can do is I can just drag this one up and they switch its you know and I can also type type in here and edit driven in to write so I’m in this long mode but I’m editing scribbling to write so it presents this enormous flexibility and to show you a little bit more of a developed document let me show you the script for this particular webinar so I used scape oh I’m alright move from scalpel to Scrivener to create the outline for this presentation and I started by just creating those points that you saw in this guy now these ones and then I had a I also had a more simplified version when this became too complicated to kind of boil it down another scaffold now but basically I moved from there and copied and pasted things directly into Scrivener and then those became sort of the these mini scribblings here these sub components of it of the of the presentation and then if I switched to you can switch back and forth between this sort of single view of just the individual scripting because this contained this is a scripting as well we can click on it again and I’ll show you everything that’s underneath it so here is showing us these five items all together and there are some other really powerful tools for a composition part of things like here if I click on compose it enters me into full screen composition mode so it removes distractions you can also set different backgrounds and you can format your text however you want I’ve chosen this sort of very plain format because that’s what I want but not everybody likes that you can easily zoom in so it’s easier to read I’ll have this done and let me show you a couple of the other views that are available so this here is the I’ll switch back to this oh I forgot I wanted to show you something else about the composition window something is really powerful is the split screen view so here there’s this little button right here if I click on it it splits the composition the screen so I can have one piece of a document here and another piece here or I can have the document that I’m writing on that I’m writing right here and then I can have research information over here such as a PDF or whatever and if you hold out a modifier key you can split the screen horizontally so these are edit and these are options for the editing view and then there are to other modes in the view in the scrivener view modes that are really powerful the first one is the cork board and the cork board is basically a place where you can you can manage documents like little index cards you can create synopses here I can write a note to myself write more about how Scrivener is helpful and here I can write a synopsis about the lab or a position editor ok and you can move these around to reorder them you can drag one into the other so that it becomes a sub document like that I just do that say I’m going to drag it back out I can and you can also add labels for example I can add a status to do and the status first draft and I can also add labels like I’ll just call this one concept and this one chapter and it gives these little colored corners and you can change all of the options about how it presents these you can make them larger and and so forth let me show you in the in this document what the cork board note looks like at the draft level at the script level it shows these different sub points here and I can also just drill down by double clicking on the document icon into that one and if I want to look at collecting research oops click them in one spot here you’ll notice that it has the same label this to do label that makes the whole thing pink all right and then there’s a third mode that’s important to know about which is the outline mode and that’s the third one up here the outline mode and it always displays the level that I map in the binder so if I back up on the draft and then I do this hide and reveal thing right here it’s going to show me these different levels of the document so here it’s basically showing me in a census is replicating this the binder but it also allows me to add different columns than to sort by those columns like if I wanted to view by the synopsis if I wanted to synopsis to be included I could do that I can say Oh show me oh there are no synopses in this one that’s the problem um and show me the keywords and the creation date and also the progress you can you can actually create you can create progress targets say I want this part to be 300 words long now in this part to be 600 words long and then this bar will slowly fill up until you research reach your target and there are way more features in Scrivener then I can cover in this brief presentation but but just to say that it’s an immensely powerful tool and I really recommend that you look into it it’s a it’s about 40 or 45 dollars I think there’s a student discount that’s available and there’s also a free 30-day trial and that’s something that literature and latte offers and they also are the creators of scalpel so you could try this both of those out for 30 days for free and Scrivener is available for Mac Windows and Linux and it has a learning a learning curve but it can start being useful to you even about you know even if you only use the split screen view and you you you just drag these around it might make it worth it especially for longer things and you can always learn more as you go and it really takes the cognitive load off because you don’t have to keep the whole document in mind the software does that for you I really recommend taking away so let’s switch back to the slides and take a look at Zotero Sottero is a citation management tool and it’s going to help you to easily cite sources you read some books or some articles and you want to let your reader know both where you got your information so that they can evaluate if it’s good information and you want to let them know where they can look to find out more information so Sottero makes it really easy to cite sources it makes it amazingly easy to generate bibliographies and it will automatically format your citations and your bibliographies in the format that you specify if you want them to be an APA style it will do APA style if you want to be in MLA style it will do MLA too much Chicago it’ll do that in there is a host of other styles that can generate to and it’s really a snap no more three hours at the end of the paper giving all the citations just right literate does that automatically and it allows you to build a bibliographic database for your whole career if you read some seminal texts in your master’s degree and later on you want to cite them during your doctorate you already have them in your database at your fingertips and it makes it really easy to continue forward in that way so let me show you what the software looks like and then we can see how it goes so this is the basic Zotero window on the left is a list of folders that I’ve created if you go to the top one this is my library and this shows you all of the articles that are already in my database I’ve got here it says 421 items so I’ve already got quite a few things in here each of these things is sorted into one of these folders as well and for the purposes of this demonstration let me create a new folder I do that by clicking on this button here and I’ll call the writing software webinar and then it shows up right here so this is where the citation information is going to go and then let’s take a look at this PDF that have already found and selected for this it’s a PDF aankhen template of an dif I want to store it in my Zotero database I just drag it in you don’t have to store your PDFs in here but you can so I’m just going to show you how to do that and then I’m let’s say I want to look at it because I want to populate the citation information so what I’m gonna do is open it up this is just my PDF you were this is the article in question and what I’m looking for is the DOI the digital object identifier which is kind of like a PDF or an ISBN but for academic articles so for newer academic articles I don’t know published since 2000 or something like that you can usually find a DOI so I’m just going to copy it and then I’m going to close this view and come back to Zotero and then I’m going to click on this little magic wand and it says add one or more items the illogic pmid so I’m gonna paste the DOI in there and I hit return and it automatically populates the database with the title of this it creates these nice creator and date lines and it creates all of this information so that I didn’t have to enter anything by hand but it automatically got the DOI information from some database on the internet somewhere no let’s say that here I’m going to drag this PDF on here so that it becomes a child item that’s how it kind of stores attachments is in this kind of format there are also places where you can add notes if you want about the document templated ed and it allows for bolding and highlighting and stuff like that and you can add tags you’ll notice up here in my library there’s a bunch of different tags that is populated way so if I wanted to I could create tags for this particular PDO this particular document and I can also add multiple notes and Link it to related items alright so that’s how you get them in there once they’re in your library you can search for them like here I’m going to search for heart which is the last thing with the author I give the also search for content little opening the content with mine in the classroom that’s the one in question okay and then I can actually cite what I have here so let’s look at the citation function how to actually get information from Zotero into an article so let’s open a word processor I’ve opened Libre Office here or neo office which is a Mac version of Libre Office and Zotero comes with three plugins for adding for using the integrating it with word and with Libre Office so let’s say something about the template of Education all right and then I want to insert that heart citation so what I do is I go here to this insert citation button and I click on it and then it asks me what citation style I want to do it and here I’m going to say APA there’s also a way to if you write an article in APA once and then later on you want to convert it there’s a way to do that um and I’m just gonna select these default options and say okay I’ll do it in APA and now it gives me this red bar and it’s a hot bar that filters so I’m gonna just type heart couldn’t tap with it and then it shows me the options I’m like okay I feel it’s right down to that one so I hit return and then it pushed this blue bubble in right here and then because this is the only article I want to cite it in this particular sentence I’m just gonna hit return again and it’s gonna drop it right in there just like that okay so it’s really easy to generate citations and it doesn’t in the proper formatting for APA and I didn’t have to type that anything and then some other articles I just want to put some more articles in here you know if we wanted to be really APA appropriate we would have the period at the end okay some are there articles so here I’m going to insert those other articles you can do this as you write or you can do it later on it’s up to you I’m gonna just grab a bunch of articles I’m going to just put in mine for putting this one I’m gonna do mindful again and put it in this one and then mindful alright and then let’s do template so now it’s got this list notice it automatically alphabetizing them for me and if I hit return again it’s gonna drop all the citations in there just like that alright so now I have my citations there in my document now how do I create that bibliography this is the part that’s really exciting so here i’m gonna type references which the atheist i’ll and this is the real magic here you there’s this um this other button up here for insert bibliography i click on it and there you go they come through they’re formatted and it’s ready to go no more three hours you know looking at the APA style guide and making sure that it fits so there is a caveat for it to do that properly you need to make sure that each entry is accurate so you need to make sure that the database actually gave you good information so i checked it to make sure oh yeah that looks good right um and if you enter information by hand you need to make sure that you have the right date and and all that information too so you have to curate your database and then your APA formatting will look good but if you do that it will look really good and it it’s pretty amazing in terms of the time saved and there it has other features you can sync with the server and you can share your citation repositories with other people too but um that’s more in-depth and you can find out more about that on the cetera website and let’s go back to the slides for the wrapping off the presentation here alright so in summary why use writing software it helps it to stay organized it helps you to stay on task it makes writing easier and that’s said the really important thing is to use what works for you I’m a believer in optimal structure now they’re too much or too little so it will probably need to take a while for you to tune in or dial in exactly how you want to use it you have to play around a little bit find out what that is but using these software tools you know there might be some upfront effort that you have to invest in order to learn them and to get proficient with them but after that they should really be pleasant and easy it shouldn’t be a chore it shouldn’t be a drag just let it be playful and maybe a little bit of a learning challenge but mostly it should really support you in your process in terms of the four tools that we covered we looked at scalpel which is a tool for brainstorming and planning we looked at notebook from circus ponies and notebook is for outlining and collecting research that’s what we talked by using the foreign yell we looked at Scrivener for composing and managing projects and we looked as at arrow for citation management I want to say too that there is some overlap among these tools so the ways that I use them might not be the optimal ways that work for you but I hope that these pieces of software inspired you to find the right situation for you and to that end I created a blog post about these and other kinds of software that I thought might be helpful for you as a writer and if you go to my website I’ll just take you there now actually and show you where you can find it so whoops so my website is Alex polish ENCOM this a le x p al ec UK calm there’s not a lot up there right now but there is this recent post software tools for writing projects if you need to you can also probably search you know writing software and then it’ll bring you to this blog post you can just click on the title and here I just go through my feelings about these different software products and give you links to them and to some other options and I go through these exact same categories of research management outliner brainstorming planning composing and managing and citation management and then at the end I have some tips for software efficiency for grad students and also some more about this book organizing creativity which I really think is a great resource that anybody who is engaged in any kind of creative process can use in order to better manage collecting ideas organizing them and implementing them you can download his book for free and if you like it you should pay him for it there’s an option to do that too alright so back to the slides so um again I’m Alex Palecek get me Sasha and if this is interesting for you I’m available for writing consultation I’m also a psychotherapist and a researcher into mindfulness and contemplative psychotherapy for treating bipolar disorder if this or anything else I mentioned is interested in you feel free to get in touch my email address is Sasha at Alex polish a calm and my website is www.miamikettlebell.com and now there is type of questions let me see if anybody has had any questions so far oh great there are a few okay so Michelle has some comments thanks for that Michelle scalpel and being a great visual organizer yeah it’s really amazing I really uh I really think it’s a cool tool and as you point out in the give scene cognitive load really does make space for creative flow if you can make it so you’re not holding so much stuff up you can kind of let the software hold it for you and then you can hone in on what it is that you really want to do that both in terms of what the information wants to say and what comes up from inside of you to say about it and Malin says something about being introduced to these wonderful tools to make the creative process and the writing that much easier and I think that’s a really accurate than to say you know it’s so easy for writing to seem like a chore and to manage all of the bits and pieces especially when the projects get bigger it can be sort of like drudgery but if we’re able to use these things to do some work and then set it aside then when we find more juice to be creative about it we can branch out in new ways and then we’re also able to go back and look at the work that we’ve already done and come back to it that’s something that for me I think has been one of the biggest lessons in doing the the coursework and the dissertation proposal research that I’ve been doing is picking up a writing project working on it intensely for hours you know dozens of hours maybe and then just putting it aside and then coming back to it a month or more later when I have a renewed effort and that’s something that the software really helps me to do because not only do I have the written piece itself but I can have all my notes about the ways I was thinking about it all the brainstorming stuff and all of the citation is kind of stored away so that later on it’s really easy for me to find out information and have it at my fingertips late or not yeah so I hope that these tools proved to be as helpful for you as they have for me and I’ve also demonstrated I think that you can use them not only for writing projects but also for other projects like planning and creating a webinar you know I used keynotes to do the actual delivery and I and I demonstrated the software in order to give you a real sense of what the software is like but in terms of the planning it was all really kind of all scaffold and Scrivener that I used for this and then if I want to decide stuff I will do that later on using the citation manager um and I hope see that you’ll check out my website and that blog post um just because it has more information about other options you know might give your Windows user you probably won’t be able to use circles poems notebook but you can find other things there that can be helpful and that can help you find something that really works for your style so I guess in closing I’d like to say thank you for watching whether you’re watching live or you’re watching after the fact I hope that this presentation has really been helpful for you and I want to invite you please to feel free to get in touch with me if you have any questions or anything at all really you can either send me an email at sasha at alex Palecek comm or you can if you want you can leave a comment on this page about this this webinar or you can leave a comment on my blog in the software writing tools and again my my name is spelled Palecek al e.x.p.s in papa al e c EK comm – that’s my website so good luck riding out there good luck getting these tools going and and feeling it out and I’d love to hear from you in the future okay fine