Thanks to Anuja Cabraal who asked this question! It’s about 2,500 words of answer, so this is absolutely a Definitive Guide. A few of the technical details here I also discuss in my earlier blog, ‘Three secrets in MSWord that will supercharge your productivity‘, but this is a lot more comprehensive!

People often ask me about my writing software, and it’s an ever-popular question for new and long-term researchers. When we spend so much time writing and editing, it’s essential that we use tools that support us to be effective. What’s more, so many programs now make jobs quick and easy that used to take hours of focussed labour: from finding secondary literature, accessing archives, formatting references, finding themes in NVivo, making graphs, editing images, running complex equations, formatting documents, finding spelling and grammar issues… surely there’s a software that basically writes the thesis for you? Sadly…