How AutoCorrect Fixed My Worst Writing Habit
If there are words or phrases you want to remove from your vocabulary but can’t seem to get rid of them, there’s a helpful trick I’ve learned over the years: Set your computer and phone to automatically replace the word as you type it.
I’ve been writing about Mac computers for a long time, which means, among other things, that I mention the menu bar—the bar at the top of the screen with text menus and icons—several times a week while writing. For a long time I combined the two words by writing “menubar”, although this is technically incorrect. My former editor didn’t like me doing that. Like, really hated it. He was so fed up with this that he told me to go into my Mac’s settings and set the computer to automatically replace the words “menu bar” with the words “menu bar.” From that point on, every time I typed “menubar”, my Mac not only replaced it, but also made a sound letting me know that it had replaced it. Eventually I stopped spelling incorrectly.
My use case is admittedly niche. But with this method, you can do much more than just be less annoying to editors. Perhaps you’re trying to swear less—you might set your device to replace swear words with cutesy alternatives, embarrassing yourself and forcing you to rewrite your sentences. Perhaps you’d like the word choice to be more gender-specific—you could set your devices to change the words “guys” to “everyone.” Or maybe you’re trying to use less expressionless language at work—you can set your computer to change phrases like “I kinda” to “I’m not sure.”
The details don’t matter here: the idea is to think about what you yourself would like to change in the way you speak.
How to set up text replacement on any device
Apple devices come with this built-in feature. On a Mac, you just need to open System Preferences and go to Keyboard . On an iPhone or iPad, you can open Settings and go to General > Keyboard , and you will see the Text Replacement option. Here you can add as many words to replace them with other words as you like.
Android has a similar feature hidden in the settings . Assuming you’re using GBoard, your default keyboard app, open your keyboard settings and go to Dictionary . Open your current dictionary and click the plus button to add a text shortcut. Add the word you want to replace as a “Shortcut” as well as the word you want to replace it with in the main text field.
Unfortunately, there is no special tool for this in Windows. The good news is that you have options. Espanso is an open source text expansion tool that I wrote about last year. It takes some time to set up but works great. If you prefer something built specifically for Windows, you can try Beeftext , which is also free and open source.