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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/20208
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/20208
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Re compatibility: Scrivener allows you to export in many formats; the company makes a point of not holding you hostage to proprietary software.

One of my favorite features of Scrivener is the organizing. You can have multiple text documents, nested in layers of folders, and you can have a split screen so you can see two documents at once (and copy-paste between them). You can view your documents as literal note cards on a cork board and add tags and keywords. This alone broke through a writer's block of many years for me.

There are additionally many tools to help you with the fine-tuning of the manuscript, like word-count goals, snapshots, searching for multiple instances of a word, a name generator — I probably don't even use a quarter of them.

In the end, however, Scrivener's tools are just about gathering many tasks which you can also do manually if you have Word and putting them into one interface. If you don't need those tools or features, you aren't behind the times by not using that particular program.

I started writing in MacWrite (yes, I'm dating myself) for as long as the OS would let me, and continued for a few years in _Quark_ because that was the program I was in most of the day as a typesetter. Whatever makes it easiest for you to write is the correct method.

Original score: 3