Text Expansion Doesn’t Just Save Time, It Clarifies Thinking

I love TextExpander. For those who do not know about this amazing piece of software, it allows you to, well, expand your text. You assign a few keyboard characters to a short code (i.e. “.n”) and if you type it, the program expands it to the larger word (i.e. “Michael J. Motta”.) Or a phrase, sentence, or entire template you type frequently.

It’s easily the app that saves me the most time on a year-to-year basis. Note that I didn’t say day-to-day basis. That’s because it saves only minutes over the course of any given day. It seems negligible, which is why too few use it. But added up over time, that’s not an insignificant amount of time. (At the end, I’ll show you the math.)

Plus, who likes typing the same words over and over again? No one good.

Story

Prior to last semester, I set up a bunch of TextExpander snippets I anticipated using when e-mailing students. Inevitably, several would ask how to log on to Blackboard, to explain something I messed up in class, or what my policy is on X. (X is usually on the Syllabus. Nevertheless…)

I did the same for sentences I’d repeatedly write on their papers (submitted as PDFs.) This is where the unexpected happened.

What I Learned

I used TextExpander to save time. What I didn’t realize until recently that was that it had other benefits, namely that it requires me to think through what I’m going to say repeatedly. This requires me to clarify my policies. What is truly important? What do I really expect out of my students? What do I most want them to learn?

In other words, it forced me to clarify my thinking.

What This Means

This insight would serve me even if I stopped teaching tomorrow. Text expansion forces me to clarify my thinking, which in turn challenges my mental models, ultimately improving my effectiveness.