Review: The ScriptureNotes Web Application is a Powerful, Flexible, Study Tool

The Gospel Library app has some good marking and notation tools, but for a long time I’ve felt its search tools left a lot to be desired. My ipad had a scripture study app that had a pretty good search tool, but its note-taking features frustrated me.

Today I’m happy to tell you about a better scripture study tool. It’s called Scripturenotes. 

If you want to see this tool in action, you can go here [https://scripturenotes.com] to see a video example of it being used. When I watched it, I instantly could see its potential and how it could jumpstart my scripture study, which has been in a bit of a dull place lately.

It's very powerful.

• I can do a search for a word or phrase in the scriptures, then can sort through the search results and eliminate results that aren’t applicable.
• Then, I can create a collection of a curated set of search results, and then make notes on each verse and add different markings to those verses.
• The application provides places to make summarizing statements about the whole collection and what was learned from it.
• It allows me to bold, underline, highlight text, even create my own footnotes. [Can I just say how excited I am to be allowed to create my own footnotes?]
• Another thing about this application that is amazing to me is that it seems like you can just start new search windows endlessly. You can go down a scripture research rabbit hole and follow it as far as you want and not have to worry about losing where you are with everything else.
• And charts! You can add tables to a Master note and then populate it with verses to compare and contrast with each other!
• You can put all kinds of other things in those Master notes: pictures, links, inspiring youtube videos! This makes it incredibly flexible.

The way that it can give room for each verse to have its own notes is another exciting thing. Just looking at that, I could see that if I’d had that in 2018 when I was doing the very first drafting of my Revelation Commentary (a project I’m working on revisions for, by the way,) I would probably have made a lot more progress right away.

I have another writing project on a scriptural topic that will probably have new life breathed into it because of this application! 

How is it on the internet? It depends on your connection. IF you have a fast connection, this should be pretty quick. If your connection is slower, it may go slower.

Can you save your notes that you make on this app? Yes. Creating a collection enables your notes to be saved in the application, and if you want to have a hard copy, you can print a collection of scriptures, along with the notes and markings you’ve made.

Now, with all of this, you may be wondering if there are any problems with this application. Would I change anything about it if I could? 

I have three little quibbles:

1)    It is hard to remember what some of the icons mean that are to the side of the verses. I kind of wish they had directions that appear when the mouse rolls over them. (However, this becomes less of an issue the more one uses the application.) [Edit: This issue has been fixed.]

2)    It would be nice if collection notes saved themselves automatically without having to push the Update button.

3)    Collection notes have a hard time handling large numbers of search results. It was choking over 300+ results, so I had to eliminate some of the search results before I could make a collection. It would be nice if they could just take whatever is thrown at them. [Edit: I've been told this cap is temporary and the current work-around is to make several collection notes and then sort search results into those various collection notes by using the 'drag-and-drop' button]

That being said, it seems like this application is really well-designed.

Now, how much does this application cost?

This is a subscription application, and use of the app costs $49.95/year. This works out to $4.16 per month, or about 14 cents a day. This powerful search tool is probably worth that because of how easy it will make it to drill down into search results and record thoughts and impressions about what you find.  Think of it this way: would you pay 14 cents a day for a tool if you knew that just 15 minutes using it would enable you to learn something new about the gospel?  Flecks of gold, people, flecks of gold…

All in all, this is a very powerful and flexible scripture study web application, and I highly recommend it.

Disclosure of Material Connection: This is a “sponsored post.” The company who sponsored it compensated me via something of value to write it. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I believe will be good for my readers. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

Status update on counsel from general conference

I feel like I want to share some things I’ve been doing since general conference in October. For a long time I’ve felt that I needed to do something to get better at following the prophet. For years I have typed so many notes in conference, and then I have never looked at them again once conference is over. Yes, it is sad, but I'm being real here. I could remember the really general counsel...if it got repeated over and over by members around me.  But I lacked initiative and focus. 

This year I felt it was important to figure out a way to make sure that I captured a list of things they counsel us to do and then work that stuff into my task list so that I actually do it.  An urgent feeling has grown in me lately of how important it is to follow the prophet’s counsel. 

So after October conference,  I made the list, and I put them into my task app on my phone and decided on when I would complete them and how often. So far I feel pretty good about how that is working in my life. There are a few things that I haven’t been able to implement as completely as I would like, but I am still trying. 

One of the things President Nelson challenged the women of the church to do was read the Book of Mormon by the end of the year and mark all verses mentioning Christ as we read. At the time, I made a note of the reading, but not of the marking aspect. I started reading, but I was kind of mechanical about it, just trying to get through the 6.5 pages I needed to read for the day. (Eventually I started just reading 7 pages to be safe.)

 I think it was mechanical at the beginning for me because I already read my scriptures every day, so I started it wondering what this was going to do for me more than I was already doing. It forced me to push through more pages than I usually read, and I think I had a hard time continuing the movement when I usually like to ruminate over things that catch my attention. 

Then someone at church mentioned they were doing the marking as President Nelson had said. I went back to look at the talk to verify that's he’d said, and it was. So I decided I needed to do that too so that I could be complete in my obedience. I started just marking instances of “God” and “Lord” and “Christ” and the various pronouns used for God. The first day I did that, I felt something special from that. But then the next days afterward it went back to feeling like a mechanical exercise. But I persisted. And then I got the idea that I should mark everything that God did and said too (not just the whole verses; I wanted to be targeted with my marking). And that made it more special, but I still felt I was missing something. (It was also difficult because I was using a dying highlighter that barely showed much. Once I switched highlighters, marking got easier.)  Eventually I realized that after having read and marked the requisite number of pages, I also needed to look back over the pages to see what I could learn from those markings. That has made it even more special.

The fascinating thing is that this marking exercise is the same thing I would do if I were trying to revise a book to fix a particular problem. (When I was trying to revise some of my fiction (still unpublished), on one of my passes I marked all instances of scenery description to see if I had enough of that and then added when there wasn’t anything there.) 

What President Nelson’s marking exercise is doing is getting us to notice all instances of God’s dealings with the Book of Mormon peoples so that we can learn more about His character and what He can do for us. It is a prophetically-mandated scripture study program to help us notice principles that we might otherwise pass over. The principles we learn will help increase our faith in God.  We need that increased faith in this day and age.

What have you learned from that challenge?

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25 Signs You Might Be a Scripture Nerd

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You might be a scripture nerd if:

1. You have highlighters, pens, colored pencils, and pencils to mark your scriptures with and you still want MORE!
2. You get excited when you find a new way to mark your scriptures.
3. Your scriptures are a rainbow of color on just about every page and have margins full of tiny notes (or oodles of sticky notes full of insights).*
4. You consider a scripture journal essential to your study.
5. You’re on your nth scripture journal.
6. You love scripture chasing to a particular reference that is cited by a speaker.
7. You dream of playing Scripture Golf ** with the stake high counsel
8. You have played Scripture Golf with the stake high counsel.
9. Someone gives a scripture reference and you automatically know what it says without having to look it up.
10. You read scripture commentaries for fun and relaxation.
11. You read a scripture commentary and you get a little miffed they didn’t include some insights you consider extra important.
12. You have written a scripture commentary.
13. You have applied for a job that would involve teaching from the scriptures.
14. You get excited whenever the Isaiah chapters come up in Sunday school.
15. You get excited anytime someone quotes Isaiah and gives a good insight about it.
16. You can’t imagine not spending time in the scriptures every day.
17. Someone says something about trying to get into a habit of reading the scriptures every day and you find yourself thinking, “Why would anyone skip scripture study?”
18. You catch all the scriptural allusions in classical literature. 
19. Along with catching the scriptural allusions, you know where they are quoting from.
20. You enjoy searching the internet to see what everybody else has said about various scriptural passages.
21. You own other versions of the Bible besides the King James Version or have consulted them online.
22. You own an exhaustive concordance or have consulted one online.
23. You find yourself doing translation and word studies even though you don’t actually understand ancient languages.
24. You consider the Topical Guide to be somewhat limited in scope and dream of making your own index.
25. You have studied ancient languages specifically so that you can understand your scriptures better.

Postscript – Some of the above are not true for me or are only partially true, so I am not the complete scripture nerd.  Also, some, like playing scripture golf with the stake high council are tongue-in-cheek.

* Alternatively, your scriptures may not be a rainbow of color and full of marginal notes, but that’s just because you’ve recently gotten a new set of scriptures again and you prefer to mark them organically rather than just transferring all your markings.

** Scripture golf – a competition in which one person reads a verse from anywhere in scripture and others try to guess the correct book and chapter that it came from.  Extra points are awarded if the correct verse number is given.

Scripture Marking Exercise: Revelation given to Gideon in Judges

 Sometimes we don’t know what to mark or how to mark it as we study scriptures. It came to me that it might be interesting to you readers to have posts that suggest simple scripture marking exercises.  If I post something, it will be because I have done it myself and derived benefit from it.

These exercises will help you recognize patterns in the text and can be a starting point for inquiry in your scripture study.

The story of Gideon stretches from Judges 6 to 8 and includes a surprising amount of revelatory experience.

Open your scriptures and in Judges 6-8 highlight every instance where the Lord, or an angel talks to Gideon, or when the spirit of God comes upon Gideon. 

Look for the following types of phrases:

·      “there came an angel of the Lord”

·      “the angel of the Lord appeared unto him”

·      “the Lord…said”

·      “the Lord said”

·      “the angel of the Lord said”

·      “the Spirit of the Lord came upon Gideon”

You might also mark instances where Gideon speaks to God.

Now what?

Some questions to think about after you survey your markings:

·      How much revelation does Gideon receive and what does this say about his spiritual sensitivity?

·      How might the things Gideon is doing relate to whether revelation comes or not?

·      What do Gideon’s experiences teach us about having or developing a relationship with God?

·      How are revelation and miracles related in the life of Gideon?

·      How is obedience and sacrifice related to miracles in the life of Gideon?

·      How much revelation does Gideon receive at the beginning versus the end of these chapters? 

·      Can you think of any explanations for what you see?

Finally, what principles can you formulate to capture what you learn?