Hello, New to the forum and newbie writer. I write in both English and French and tend to use a lot of expressions derived from slang. I also make up words and expressions in both languages. I would like to have at my disposal a usable repository of all the expressions I have gathered and created when I start writing. Unfortunately, I am somewhat confused as to how I should organise the material efficiently, and what software or utility would best suit and would really appreciate your suggestions and comments. I have found a number of lexical tools, but they tend to be focused on single words, as a dictionary would. This is very useful as I intend to build my own slang dictionary (largely for argot or French slang) but generally quite fiddly (for what I have found so far) and it only covers part of what I would like to achieve. In particular, the organisation breaks don when I want to organise a list of expressions or short sentences, not based therefore on single lexical entries and word definitions. And finally, as I said, I gather a lot of expressions in both English and French and create my own, so I have varied sources I would like to save in addition to the expressions themselves. Until it is done, I need to find a tool flexible enough to store and sort results as required but also to store a variety of media such as documents or PDF files, scanned images, web links and sometimes video (I guess I will use just links to videos. I have tried using Writer's Café or similar software but could not find a way to accommodate all the requirements. I have also tried to use Zotero and EndNote but they're much more geared towards citation in papers and bibliography formatting. I guess I need some kind of a free-form database but then how can I organise it and use it directly when I write to select and drop phrases into Word or any other writing software? Sorry about the long post. I would really appreciate some pointers, especially if you have come across a similar issue of organisation and usability. Just to be clear, I am on Windows and unfortunately cannot use Mac software at this stage. Thank you for your comments. Best. Remi
A lot of us on this site use Scrivener, a writer's app particularly suited to writing fiction. In the edit menu, there is "Sort by paragraphs" either A-Z or Z-A. This might be useful for creating a dictionary.
