Text Replacements Is a Game Changer — & Why Every Writer Should Use Them

More Efficiency, Productivity, Style, and Correctness.

Text Replacements is a feature on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS devices (and others) that replaces a shortcut with a replacement. For instance, “omw” can be replaced with “on my way.” They are very useful for making a writing workflow way more efficient. Also, they can be used to write characters that are not available on a standard keyboard. The usage of Text Replacements also ensures consistency in style, especially in regards to spaces and special-use characters. How I use Text Replacements to significantly enhance and speed up my writing is explained in the following:

Shortcuts

This category is probably the most known and used one: creating shortcuts for (often typed) words or phrases. For instance, instead of writing my full email address, I just write “@@.” This makes frequent sentences like “My email is…” much more quick. Furthermore, I have “##” for my phone number, “addr” for my address (that is four characters instead of 28), and my initilals for my full name. I also have a shortcut for the name of my hometown and “deu” for “Deutschland.” Instead of writing lengthy months like “Dezember,” I simply write “dez” and Text Replacement does the rest. For the standard Lorem Ipsum…