I have tried all the writing programs, so you don’t have to 

I have tried all the writing programs (well, almost), so you don’t have to. In the course of the last few years, when writing became more and more part of my line of business, I tried so many writing programs. Word, Nisus, Scrivener, Mellel, Pages, you name it. One of the reasons for being a bit of a flâneur is that my daily job requires the use of non-alphabetic languages, traditional and simplified Chinese in particular. And in the same way I prioritize different aspects of my writing process, so do the creators of these programs. 

In this post, I share my opinion on these programs. Some, I know very well; others are more recent acquaintances. As you may have guessed already, I am a Mac user, and some of the programs discussed below are only compatible with Apple machines. Also, my writing process does not prioritize complex tables or graphs, as it may be for someone working  in STEM. Having said this, let’s start. 

The priorities

Anyone deciding what to work with needs to clarify their own priorities. What do you want your writing program to achieve? Content management? Flexibility with tags? Or is your priority having good instruments to build complex tables? And how early in the process do you need to access these priorities?

For me, it really depends on the stage at which I am in the writing process. I like to have the details set in place already (footnote size, citation styles, and so on), since I find it easier to set it at the beginning than revising it later in the process. My understanding is that editing relies now more on the author, and less on editors who would turn your messy work into a piece of writing where footnotes and endnotes all follow the same style. Lacking those figures, authors are asked to follow guidelines for publication, for which familiarity with automated referencing styles is very helpful. 

Let’s start with Word. You cannot escape Word! It is the most universally used program, so like it or not, at some point you’ll have to learn some basic set-up with it. Word is handy for my work because I can set up different fonts for whether I am writing in English (Latin languages) and Chinese (Asian languages) within the same style. In this way, all I have to do is switch between keyboards, and I do not have to interrupt the writing flow to go change the font. Nice, right? And it is not just about aesthetics. Using the font that, at least to me, represents most clearly Chinese characters helps me catch typos, both as I write and I re-read.

Images to set up different fonts within the same style. The style here is “Normal”, the font for Asian is DengXian, and when you change the selection to Latin, you can choose another font. 

Word also has really nice tabling, with a lot of options, something that programs such as Scrivener lacks sorely. Word handles images rather well, if you goal is to simply insert them at the center of the pages without too much fussing about the location of the text. 

Arguably, for a very nice integration between images you would want to use Nisus. Nisus is superior when it comes to complex formatting. But it also requires more familiarity with the program, and to spend some time with the user’s program. 

For me, Nisus is what you use in the final stages to format a very long project. I wrote my PhD dissertation divided in many files, most in Nisus, and some in Word, without worrying too much about their formatting. At the end of it, I pasted it all in Nisus, and started refining the details. The interface that allows you to set styles is very nice and easy to comprehend at a glance. The palette dock on the right side has a lot of options. I had then to turn to the user manual for more specific details of how my page should be set up according to Penn’s guidelines, but that was also a breeze to complete. 

Like Nisus, Mellel has similar potential when you need to work with long documents with multi-sections. Unlike Nisus, Mellel is well integrated with Bookends, and the combination Mellel + Bookends work more reliably than the combo Word + Zotero, which is terrible with non-alphabetic scripts – one of the reasons why I decided to give it a try. (I will return to this later this year.) I just started playing around Mellel, because I started working on a forthcoming volume, but all I have for now is just a handful of documents. While you can have a set-up handling multiple docs in Mellel, its potential resides in organizing a complex set of material. 

In the early stages of writing, Scrivener is my favourite program. I use it for circa the first two thirds of the writing process. A great feature of Scrivener is that you can bring together multiple documents all in one file. The screenshot below is a file where I am working on a study and translation of *And then he commanded 乃命, an ancient Chinese manuscript. On the left side Scrivener has a menu where you can create folder and group documents. In the folder titled 乃命 I have several documents: the first section 乃命一, the second one 乃命二, notes and thoughts that I take as I read this text, and so on.

I like this feature because, instead of swapping across multiple windows of the same program, I have one window open and I can see all the relevant working documents in there. Scrivener also has the option to split the window, either horizontally or vertically, and you can place different documents in the widows. So, e.g., as I work on my translation on the top window, I keep open below the “all notes” file, to take notes about recurring structures. 

You can also drop PDF straight into Scrivener, which I usually collect in a folder named “scholarship”. Now I can work on my translation on the top side, while having a paper by Wang Kaibo 王凯博 at the bottom. This is handy because short papers on ancient Chinese manuscripts often argue how to read a sentence without reproducing the manuscript in its entirety. In this way, I can study Wang’s suggestions on strips 11-12 of *And then he commanded (two) while having the context and my translation of it right on top, for me to double check the context. 

Another nice touch is the possibility to link these documents in the writing. So, in my document “乃命一”, I can annotate the translation with “check this in “all notes”, and put a hyperlink to that file, so I can jump to it right away. 

Scrivener has various shortcomings: as mentioned, tabling is terrible; it does not handle images as well, as you can see from the previous image; the footnotes by default appear in the right column, together with the comments, which I find at times confusing (the color differs, but I still find it cluttered). 

If your goals are simple and you just want to experiment with some options besides Word, you can try with some of the simplest word processors, such as Bean for Apple or Typora (check out this review). Being free of options can be a way to be free of distractions, but as soon as I saw introductory videos for these programs, I knew they were not for me. I need to be able to mark down separate sections, and I work better by starting with multiple files filled with annotations before writing a coherent narrative devoid of highlights, notes, and the alike. 

So what program should you use? Well, I said that I tried them all so that you don’t have to, but actually, you do have to try them. What you need in your writing workflow is highly subjective, and it may change depending on the project. For collaborative projects, Word is probably the easiest, since everyone can access it regardless of their laptop brand. It is still very helpful to watch videos and have reviews of what you can do with a program, to get a sense of how relatable it may be to you.