Tuesday’s writing tip for authors

Many authors waste a lot of time and keystrokes by constantly retyping the same words and phrases over and over again while planning, writing, and promoting their book. The most common culprits include words and phrases like their book’s title, the titles of competing books, as well as words and phrases repeated frequently throughout books, such as your name, author names of competing books, as well as website URLs. The more technical your book, the more likely you are to repeat the words and phrases frequently used in your field.

In many cases, you’re likely to be reusing the same words over and over again, not only while writing your book, but in the years ahead as you promote your book and create related e-books, newsletters, press releases, presentations, speeches, and other marketing materials that involve the same words.

AutoCorrect Is Not Enough
Many authors are familiar with Microsoft Word’s AutoCorrect feature which allows you to set up Word to automatically substitute a multi-character phrase when a certain keystroke combination–unlikely to appear in words, or by itself–has been typed.

When I wrote Looking Good in Print, for example, all I had to do was enter “lgip” and–immediately upon pressing the space bar–Looking Good in Print would appear on screen. Another example was “omd” which inserted The One-Minute Designer when I pressed the space bar.

If you’ve worked with Word’s AutoCorrect, you know how quickly that you learn to type “lgip” when you mean Looking Good in Print. Your programmed shortcuts quickly become instinctive, and you don’t even think about them!

The problem with Word’s AutoCorrect feature, however, is that substitutions only appear in Word, not in other Windows-based programs, such as Excel, Explorer, Outlook, PowerPoint, Publisher, Firefox, MindManager, InDesign, PhotoShop, etc.

Universal keyboard shortcuts
Buzz Bruggerman’s ActiveWords differs in that it is a universal character substitution program: once you enter a shortcut to a longer phrase, the substitution will take place in all of your software programs running on Microsoft Windows.

ActiveWords has been around for several years, and has established a worldwide following. More important, a new version, ActiveWords 1.95. is now available as a download for a free 60-day testdrive. 60-days is more than enough time to discover what other computer-users have found: that ActiveWords quickly becomes an indispensable writing tool. Try it today, for a 60-day trial today.