Apps for writing your thesis

A piece of advice given to postgrad students everywhere is “write every day.” It’s great advice. We should all do it, but some of us find it hard. If you’re like me you’ll begin with a loose collection of ideas flying in close formation with no clear indication of what’s relevant or where to start. The process of getting from there to a written thesis can seem daunting, and there is an overwhelming number of books, websites and apps which offer advice and help. Here’s what worked for me.

The first thing I realised was that word processors like Pages or Word are great for checking and formatting sentences, paragraphs and chapters, but less helpful for composing them in the first place. For me, the process of organising my thoughts and writing them down was going to be an iterative one. Mind mapping software could have helped if I’d had a clear overview of the whole thing at the outset, but I didn’t. I needed to be able to do different types of writing at different points in my journey, and I’ve found apps which helped with each of these.

For literature review notes and for noting down insights and connections I originally used an A5 notebook, which I carried with me everywhere. Over six years I filled 11 of these, so an iPad was a brilliant innovation for me. Evernote is a free application which can be downloaded onto a PC, a Mac, an iPhone or an iPad. It allows me to create Notebooks and add Notes to them – written ones, web links and clippings, or images. I can use Evernote to take and store a photo or audio record if that’s an easier way to capture an idea, and I can embed document, pdf or spreadsheet files in a Note. I can tag my Notes with keywords to make them easier to find. I also take care with the naming of each Note so that, when I sort them by title, those on similar topics stay together. Evernote also syncs to the cloud, so that I can write a Note on my iPad and it automatically appears on my iPhone, Mac and PC. Also I can share a Notebook with other people, e.g. a supervisor. I wish it had been invented earlier!

For those of us who don’t get along with mind mapping, Scrivener is a great writing tool for iterative reorganisation of their writing. Scrivener costs US$45 but I think it’s worth every cent. In addition to the usual text window, I could see at a glance all of the other documents in my project. I could move them around, split the screen to compare documents, and easily split or merge documents. Each document has the digital equivalent of a note card attached to it on which I could summarise that document. I could then see them laid out on a “cork board” and easily change their order, and when I was (reasonably) happy with what I’d written I could compile it into a single Word document. There are both Mac and PC versions and I highly recommend it.

The other big problem with writing is Getting On With It. I used the Pomodoro technique which  involves setting a timer for 25 minutes and writing continuously for that time before taking a five minute break and then doing it all over again. The official Pomodoro timer costs US$5.90 (pomodoro is Italian for “tomato,” the shape of the original kitchen timer used). I used a less fancy-looking timer, called Timeleft which is free. And if you find the Internet is a continuous distraction you can block the sites which regularly subvert your best intentions during your writing time with another free app, a Firefox add-on called Leechblock 

Author: Jennie Swann