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L is for … Linguistic Focus

Among all the topics listed in the Index of Scrivener Posts, I hope you’ve found time to try out the Linguistic Focus.

Using Linguistic Focus involves some of those essential executive functions.

1. The ability to anticipate what’s coming up and make plans accordingly – see also number 8, flexibility!
2. The ability to organise – thoughts, ideas, the scenes/chapters of my novels, …
3. Reliability – doing what we agreed when we said it would be done (or earlier!)
4. Getting up and getting on with the work – ie self motivation
5. Managing our time to achieve the best results
6. Paying attention to detail (quality …)
7. Remembering stuff that’s important
8. Flexibility – willingness to make changes in our plans or our approach
9. Determination – ability to keep going
10. Willingness to reflect on our own contribution to the team (and learn from it)

Scrivener gem

Linguistic Focus provides a way of zoning in on particular types of words. 

If you have time today, read on. If not, make a note to come back to this post another day.

When editing material for my clients, I use Linguistic Focus to check the punctuation of their dialogue. I can’t share a sample of their work with you here, but you’ll see how – in one of my novels – I can ‘see’ the dialogue and very quickly check my own punctuations at the start and end of each string of dialogue.

If you are trying to tighten up your text, you might use Linguistic Focus to identify adverbs as these can often be deleted without loss of content.

For fun, check out one scene to see how many adverbs you’ve used, how many adjectives …

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