Scrivener’s Linguistic Focus

Scrivener 3’s Linguistic Focus

One of the best new features in the updated Scrivener 3 is the new functionality called linguistic focus. This is one of those features you didn’t know you needed until you had it. It reminds me a little bit of the Sony Walkman back in the day. You finally had a music device that gave you portability, control, and some longevity…until the iPod came along, and blew up the whole notion of portable music, and changed an industry forever. #Revelation


Linguistic Focus in Practice

Once you’ve edited with Scrivener 3’s linguistic focus, you’ll realize that there was always a better way to edit. Take me, for example. I recently released my second novel, and it wasn’t until I was on my second edit that I realized I had a character with a very specific speech pattern that required special attention, or it wasn’t going to work. I was a little overwhelmed at first until I remembered I had upgraded to Scrivener 3 which happened to come with this new handy dandy feature.


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I scrambled to find the linguistic focus feature (Edit —> Writing Tools —> Linguistic Focus. Once activated, Scrivener 3 gave me a little dialogue box (pop up window) that let me control the parts of speech I wanted to zero in on. Scrivener achieves this by “greying out” the text that doesn’t belong to the part of speech you select, in effect, bringing it to the foreground.


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By selecting “Direct Speech” I was able to “focus” in on the dialogue, the very part of speech I was trying to address. After that, a simple Command + F (to search, or “find”) on a Mac, or CTRL + F for Windows to search for my character’s dialogue tags (his name) let me quickly identify his speech and dialogue beats. I can only estimate how much time this feature saved me, but I have no doubt it was significant.


If you haven’t fired up the linguistic focus feature yet, I’d highly recommend you give it a whirl. Like me, you might just find you’ve outlived your Walkman, and have had an iPod within reach this whole time.

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Published on August 12, 2020 21:00
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