How Autoreplace Fixed My Worst Writing Habit

If there words or phrases you want to remove from you vocabulary, but can't seem to shake, there's a helpful trick I have learned over the years: Set up your computer and phone to automatically replace the word when you type it.

I've written about Mac computers for a long time, which among other things means I mention the menu bar—that strip at the top of the screen with text menus and icons—multiple times a week while writing. For a long time, I combined those two words, writing "menubar," even though that is technically incorrect. A former editor of mine hated that I did this. Like, really hated it. He got so sick of it that he told me to go into my Mac's settings and set up my computer to automatically replace the word "menubar" with the words "menu bar." From that point on, anytime I typed "menubar," my Mac would not only replace it but make a sound letting me know it replaced it. Eventually, I stopped typing it incorrectly.

Now, my use case here is admittedly niche. But you can do so much more than annoy editors less with this technique. Maybe you're trying to swear less—you could set up your device to replace curse words with cutesy alternatives, thus embarrassing yourself into re-writing your sentences. Maybe you'd like your word choices to be more gender inclusive—you could set up your devices to replace words like "guys" with "everyone." Or maybe you're trying to use less wishy-washy language at work—you could set up your computer to change phrases like "kind of" with "I'm not sure."

The specifics here don't matter—the idea is to think of the things that you, yourself, would like to change about the way you talk.

How to set up text replacements on any device

Apple devices come with this feature built in. On a Mac, you just need to open System Settings and head to Keyboard. On an iPhone or iPad, you can open Settings and head to General > Keyboard, and you'll see the Text Replacements option. Here you can add as many words to replace with other words as you like.

Android has a similar feature buried in the settings. Assuming you're using GBoard, the default keyboard app, open the settings for your keyboard and go to Dictionary. Open your current dictionary and hit the plus button to add a Text Shortcut. Add the word you want to replace as the "Shortcut" and the word you want to replace it with in the main text field.

Windows, sadly, doesn't have a dedicated tool for this. The good news is that you've got options. Espanso is an open source text expansion tool I wrote about last year—it takes some time to set up but works great. If you'd prefer something made specifically for Windows, you can check out Beeftext, which is also free and open source.