Brandeis Design and Innovation

Project and Writing Organization

Digital tools can help you manage long-form writing projects. Many of these tools have multiple applications (e.g., try Trello for creating an outline; Scrivener is useful for notetaking and longform writing). Experiment and design a methodology that works best for you.

Notation and Writing Journals

Thinking about how to organize your notes, outlines, and drafts is critical, and is especially useful for cases like dissertations or theses, when the author might plan on rewriting at a later date. Look for platforms that facilitate easy searching. It’s possible to search your computer folders by keyword, but it’s clunky and hidden folders make it easy to miss something. Note-taking applications like Evernote, Pages, and Scrivener allow users to tie custom keywords to each document, and these are searchable. Similarly, the built-in search feature can quickly scan all of your writing.

Task Tracking + Visual Outlining

Embed Tasks/Keywords/Categories in your Citation Manager

There are several features built into citation managers to facilitate customized organization schemes. Create groups of citations — particular subjects you’re researching, for a particular class, for a future project, etc. Citations can be added to multiple groups. Use the keywords and custom field options to create further categories, including what work is left for that source (e.g. “summary done”, “mine this bibliography”, etc.).

Writing Platforms

Writing is not a linear process. You write, revise, move whole sections around; you cut out sections and might eventually want them back. Scrivener is a great program for long-term writing projects; it has multiple options for viewing and working through a draft, because people work differently. You can tie summaries, keywords, and different icons to documents to track where you are. You can easily drag and reorder sections. You can archive drafts at different stages. You can simultaneously view different sections of a document, which is useful if you want to self-check redundancies. Evernote and Pages are also great options for writing drafts, because of the built-in search features, multi-document views, etc.