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Category Archives: Writing
5 Typography essentials for academic texts
Typography can affect everything from the mood of a text to how convincing its arguments are. When self-publishing a thesis or working paper, or even in preparing a piece for review it’s good to follow these rules to make your texts … Continue reading
Taking full advantage of Scrivener’s power for short writing: Streamlining research and writing
Recently, I’ve been writing shorter pieces and have developed a new workflow in Scrivener. At the beginning of a writing session, I work on the text which I’m prepared to write (i.e. I have all the references and ideas fleshed … Continue reading
Color-coding scrivenings in Scrivener
One of things that makes Scrivener such a joy to work with is being able to color code scrivenings. At a glance, you can immediately see the state of different parts of text and, if you’re using Scrivener for collaboration, … Continue reading
One more reason to use Scrivener for thesis writing
In addition to the five reasons to write your thesis in Scrivener there is at least one more: Scrivener provides a possibility of seeing and editing concurrently several snippets of texts. It’s invaluable if you want to align several distant parts of your … Continue reading
5 reasons to write your thesis in Scrivener
Writing a thesis is painful. And it should be. But the pain should rest in wrestling with ideas and data not with software. Scrivener takes the pain out of the software side and ensures that your attention is always in … Continue reading
Writing a thesis one day at a time
Usually, a thesis is the first book you will write and all professional writers talk about the importance of setting a daily target. When writing up your thesis, a daily target is critical if you want to avoid a breakdown … Continue reading
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When Microsoft Word is best for the job
In the past Macademic wrote about misuses of and alternatives to Microsoft Word. But we also believe sometimes Word is the best tool for the job. In such cases it should be used to its full capacity including captions and cross-referencing, custom keyboard … Continue reading
Power editing: Stalin’s blue ink
Powerful writing is all about a carefully deleted word. I recalled this while reading the brilliant and surprising account of Stalin as editor by Holly Case. Here is an example of a paragraph from the infamous History of the Communist Party of the Soviet … Continue reading
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Disciplining the mind with software
One of the challenges with writing is switching between different mindsets. Theoretically it is possible to switch between these mindsets within a single writing environment like Microsoft Word or even on a sheet of paper. The problem is that when … Continue reading
The Tao of the three drafts
writing is creation. writing is change. writing is clarity. These three principles from the Tao of Writing illustrate why writing is difficult: because it requires the writer to switch between different mindsets – one for each of the principles. The … Continue reading
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Academic workflows on a Mac 