You can use blank styles to mark text in your project that you want to go back to and revise.
Styles allow you to apply formatting presets to different parts of your Scrivener project. But there’s another way you can use styles when you’re editing or revising your draft. Instead of using styles to change the formatting of text, you can use styles to mark sections of text that you want to revise.
The Scrivener manual, in section 17.4.4, calls these Styles That Do Nothing. For the purposes of this article, I call these blank styles, because these styles don’t change the formatting of your text, but work as markers for parts of your draft that you want to come back to. Here’s how to use blank styles.
What are styles?
Styles are combinations of formatting settings that you can use and reuse for consistency and ease of formatting in your projects. Styles can include settings such as font face, size, and color; and they can include paragraph settings such as line spacing, alignment, tabs, and more. You can use styles for headings, body text, block quotes, and any other type of formatting you use often.
Read Customize the Scrivener Editor 3 – Use Styles to Format Your Scrivener Projects to learn more about styles in Scrivener.
Why blank styles are useful for revision
You can use styles when you’re writing to mark text with specific paragraph formatting, such as block quotes, or character formatting, such as italic or bold. This sort of formatting gives meaning to the text; you could call this semantic formatting.
Blank styles are different. They don’t change the text at all, but they serve as flags to highlight different parts of your draft that you want to examine closely. You can use these styles when you’re writing or revising to mark sections you want to change.
Here are a few examples of blank styles that you might want to use:
- A blank style to indicate dialogue that you want to improve.
- A style for text where you’re not happy with the wording, and want to improve it.
- A style to mark potential repetition of content, description, or exposition.
- Another style to indicate sections of your draft that you may want to consider cutting.
How to create blank styles
To create a style in Scrivener, you format some text, then select it and choose Format > Style > New Style from Selection.
To make a blank style, don’t change any formatting; just select a paragraph of your text. In the dialogue that displays, give the style a name and leave the defaults, which are Save All Formatting, Include Font Family, and Include Font Size.
What is important is to next check Draw Highlight Box Around Text. If you click the color well, a color picker lets you choose a color. Click OK to save your style. This means that when you apply the style, the only change that Scrivener makes is adding the highlight box around selected text.
You could create just one blank style for the body text of your project, but if you are using multiple styles already in your project, you may want to create a new blank style from each style that you’ve used. Or, you may want to create multiple blank styles for different markers, such as one for longer sections of text, one for dialog, and one for words you want to replace with better choices, as suggested earlier. Name each style you create accordingly.
The first style I showed above is a paragraph style, and as you’ll see below, you can apply a paragraph style by clicking anywhere in a paragraph and choosing that style. But you may also want to create styles that only apply to one or several words. In that case, you want to create a character style. To do that, when you create your style in the Formatting menu, choose Save Character Attributes.
You’ll see below that you can apply a character style to individual words, something you can’t do with paragraph styles.
How to apply and remove blank styles
To apply a blank style in a paragraph, click anywhere in a paragraph and choose it from the Style menu above the editor.
You can see that the actual style of the text hasn’t changed, but there is now a colored box around it.
The Style menu is split into two sections: at the top are paragraph styles, and at the bottom are character styles. To apply a character style to a single word, click your cursor anywhere in a word or select a word, then choose a character style from the Style menu. You can also apply a character style by selecting several words and then choosing that style. You could use a character style like this to select and highlight a single sentence in a paragraph, something you can’t do with a paragraph style.
To remove a style, place your cursor in text or select text as above, then choose the Style menu. The selected style has a check mark next to it. Select that style again, and it will be unchecked, and removed from the text. If, however, you created your blank style from another style you use, don’t remove the style: click the original style to retain its formatting.
To easily apply blank styles as you read through your draft, you can display the Styles Panel. Choose Format > Style > Show Styles Panel. This panel floats over the Scrivener window so you can quickly access it. To apply a style, insert your cursor in a paragraph or select some text, then click the style. To remove a style using the Styles Panel, click Remove Style in the Styles Panel.
How to search for text with blank styles
If you use blank styles for revision, once you’ve done a pass through your manuscript, you may want to find all the text that you have marked with these styles. There are two ways you can do this.
The first is to click the arrow next to the search button in the toolbar above the Binder and choose Find by Formatting. In the dialog that displays, choose Style in the Find menu, then choose a Style Name at the bottom of the dialog. Each time you click Next, Scrivener will highlight text with the selected style. You can search in All Documents or just the Current Editor.
Another way to find text with blank styles is to right-click a style in the Styles Panel and then choose Select All Text with Paragraph Style or Select All Text with Character Style. This may be less practical for going over your revisions as it selects all the text marked with these styles rather than one selection at a time. But you can use this selection to remove the blank style from all selected text if you want.
Kirk McElhearn is a writer, podcaster, and photographer. He is the author of Take Control of Scrivener, and host of the podcast Write Now with Scrivener. He also offers one-to-one Scrivener coaching.