Hi guys,
I'm sorry if this is not exactly the right forum but I couldn't find anything better suited and in the end more writing speed = more money so I guess it fits. This is a quick tutorial for something that has saved me hours over hours of time since I started using it about three years ago and allows me to write a lot better in much less time. The secret? Autocorrect for your desktop computer.
"But I can already touch-type", you say, "I write quickly!"
"I don't need no stupid autocorrect that never works!"
"I already use a spell-checker once I'm done writing."
Let me preface this with a quick calculation of the total "cost" of a single typo:
Let's say you're in the flow, typing roughly 200 characters per minute. Correcting a typo costs about five seconds if you are fast (control-backspace, retype the word correctly is usually faster than repeat-backspace, correct and retype) and can take more like ten, twenty seconds if you are the kind of guy who takes his hands off the keyboard, grabs the mouse, selects the single wrong character, hands back to keyboard, retype, use mouse to click at the end of the line, start typing again.
That is a huge amount of time wasted on just a single, tiny typo and now consider how many typos you make for any regular page or blog post. The worst part however is that each of them gets you out of the typing flow, you stop thinking about what you wanted to write and after correcting the mistake you have to get back into that.
Multiply that by the amount of words you type each day and you will quickly find that you waste a lot of time on - often repeat - errors that your fingers have soaked up into muscle memory.
If you are still not convinced let me get into abbreviations: You know all those iircs, ikrs and srslys? They are there because people don't like to type the whole words, because it take a lot of time to type them out and the keys are sometimes in odd places on the keyboard? That is only the start though, what if you could abbreviate bc to because, dont to don't and take out most double letters (leters) that make no real sense to type each and every time?
The secret is quite simple, and it is completely free. It is, as you have probably guessed based on Autohotkey, specifically this script: (Google ahk autocorrect as I can't post links yet). It will already do quite a few cool corrections but I made a couple of important additions:
The main one is that I put the key to add a correction from the default windows-M to CAPSLOCK. Yes, that totally useless key in one of the most convenient positions now becomes useless and quite frankly awesome. When you spot a typo you now press it, the last typed word is selected and a small popup window prompts you to enter the correct form. This is not only just as fast as control-backspace correction, it is even marginally faster because it's just one key instead of two and you can keep your fingers on the home row. After that you press enter and the newly added correction is added to the dictionary.
That's it, now you'll never make that typo again, won't even really notice when you make it.
From there on out it's just a matter of time and growing the list until you can write pretty much perfect copy right out of the box, for most of my writing I don't even use any spell checkers anymore because I know the words are all technically correct at this point. If you do any kind of "real" writing it's still useful to use something like grammarly for sentence structure and such, but for ninety percent of writing you won't need anything else.
I have over time developed my own kind of shorthand, for example the word he'll shortened would be hell so I simply started using a third letter at the end (helll) as a sign that I want the word with the apostrophe. This does not save as much time as the same change does for the word don't but it is still much faster than using the apostrophe key that is quite weirdly located on my German keyboard. Every word I hate typing (for example necessary) is automatically abbreviated and the script takes care of such annoying things like typing capital letters after a full stop.
And you will notice the benefits in all kinds of places. Your forum posts will be much more legible, your email conversations with clients will be much smoother and of course your blog posts will be better than most in less time. If you write ebooks you will find it saves a lot of time even for a simple recipe book and so on.
So for everyone interested in this method take a look at that script, I have put it into my cloud storage and have a link to it in my autostart folder so I always have it running when my computer starts. Oh yeah, that is the final advantage: Since AutoHotkey hooks into your keyboard driver this script will work everywhere, not just in one writing program.
And as a final note: I wrote this post in roughly 20 minutes, it has a little over 800 words as I type this sentence which puts me at roughly 40wpm and I wrote super relaxed, had no idea what to write before I started, made up my sentences as I typed them and do not feel even slightly fatigued. Give it a try, my guess is that you won't regret it.
I hope you enjoyed this post, it sure helped me write all those ebooks, forum posts etc.
I'm sorry if this is not exactly the right forum but I couldn't find anything better suited and in the end more writing speed = more money so I guess it fits. This is a quick tutorial for something that has saved me hours over hours of time since I started using it about three years ago and allows me to write a lot better in much less time. The secret? Autocorrect for your desktop computer.
"But I can already touch-type", you say, "I write quickly!"
"I don't need no stupid autocorrect that never works!"
"I already use a spell-checker once I'm done writing."
Let me preface this with a quick calculation of the total "cost" of a single typo:
Let's say you're in the flow, typing roughly 200 characters per minute. Correcting a typo costs about five seconds if you are fast (control-backspace, retype the word correctly is usually faster than repeat-backspace, correct and retype) and can take more like ten, twenty seconds if you are the kind of guy who takes his hands off the keyboard, grabs the mouse, selects the single wrong character, hands back to keyboard, retype, use mouse to click at the end of the line, start typing again.
That is a huge amount of time wasted on just a single, tiny typo and now consider how many typos you make for any regular page or blog post. The worst part however is that each of them gets you out of the typing flow, you stop thinking about what you wanted to write and after correcting the mistake you have to get back into that.
Multiply that by the amount of words you type each day and you will quickly find that you waste a lot of time on - often repeat - errors that your fingers have soaked up into muscle memory.
If you are still not convinced let me get into abbreviations: You know all those iircs, ikrs and srslys? They are there because people don't like to type the whole words, because it take a lot of time to type them out and the keys are sometimes in odd places on the keyboard? That is only the start though, what if you could abbreviate bc to because, dont to don't and take out most double letters (leters) that make no real sense to type each and every time?
The secret is quite simple, and it is completely free. It is, as you have probably guessed based on Autohotkey, specifically this script: (Google ahk autocorrect as I can't post links yet). It will already do quite a few cool corrections but I made a couple of important additions:
The main one is that I put the key to add a correction from the default windows-M to CAPSLOCK. Yes, that totally useless key in one of the most convenient positions now becomes useless and quite frankly awesome. When you spot a typo you now press it, the last typed word is selected and a small popup window prompts you to enter the correct form. This is not only just as fast as control-backspace correction, it is even marginally faster because it's just one key instead of two and you can keep your fingers on the home row. After that you press enter and the newly added correction is added to the dictionary.
That's it, now you'll never make that typo again, won't even really notice when you make it.
From there on out it's just a matter of time and growing the list until you can write pretty much perfect copy right out of the box, for most of my writing I don't even use any spell checkers anymore because I know the words are all technically correct at this point. If you do any kind of "real" writing it's still useful to use something like grammarly for sentence structure and such, but for ninety percent of writing you won't need anything else.
I have over time developed my own kind of shorthand, for example the word he'll shortened would be hell so I simply started using a third letter at the end (helll) as a sign that I want the word with the apostrophe. This does not save as much time as the same change does for the word don't but it is still much faster than using the apostrophe key that is quite weirdly located on my German keyboard. Every word I hate typing (for example necessary) is automatically abbreviated and the script takes care of such annoying things like typing capital letters after a full stop.
And you will notice the benefits in all kinds of places. Your forum posts will be much more legible, your email conversations with clients will be much smoother and of course your blog posts will be better than most in less time. If you write ebooks you will find it saves a lot of time even for a simple recipe book and so on.
So for everyone interested in this method take a look at that script, I have put it into my cloud storage and have a link to it in my autostart folder so I always have it running when my computer starts. Oh yeah, that is the final advantage: Since AutoHotkey hooks into your keyboard driver this script will work everywhere, not just in one writing program.
And as a final note: I wrote this post in roughly 20 minutes, it has a little over 800 words as I type this sentence which puts me at roughly 40wpm and I wrote super relaxed, had no idea what to write before I started, made up my sentences as I typed them and do not feel even slightly fatigued. Give it a try, my guess is that you won't regret it.
I hope you enjoyed this post, it sure helped me write all those ebooks, forum posts etc.