The 5 useful keyboard shortcuts below will indulge that writing life fantasy a bit and help keep your fingers vigorously working away at your craft without interruption..
Plain text throughout a document can be tedious to read, so you’ll often find yourself setting words or phrases apart with a formatting style, such as bold text or italicized text.
You also might need to alter a layout by organizing your text in different ways, such as centered or left-justified alignments. These typing shortcuts will help you make those changes.
When used sparingly, bold text can highlight an extra important point you want your reader to understand. People who only scan your text are more likely to read bolded points and skim over other sections.
To bold text on a Mac
Command (⌘) + B
To bold text on a PC
Ctrl + B
On your website, you might want to center images between margins or center text in your image captions.
To center text on a Mac
Command (⌘) + E
To center text on a PC
Ctrl + E
Select text
When I’m reviewing a draft, I often see what I want the text to look like faster than I can rearrange it to fit my vision.
So, to edit content as quickly as possible, I can use keyboard commands instead of moving my hand over to the trackpad on my laptop.
Once I’ve selected a portion of text, I can copy or cut it, and then paste it somewhere else in the draft. We’ll get to those actions next.
To select text on a Mac
Place your cursor on either side of the text that you want to select, then you can choose from the key combinations below to highlight the proper section:
Shift + Left Arrow key (+ Up Arrow key or Down Arrow key to select a larger portion of text)
Shift + Right Arrow key (+ Up Arrow key or Down Arrow key to select a larger portion of text)
You press down the Shift key and then tap on the appropriate Arrow keys until you have your selection. You can also keep the Arrow keys pressed down, but tapping gives you more precise control over which text you highlight.
When you release your fingers from the Shift and Arrow keys, the text will remain highlighted, awaiting your next action for what you want to do with the selection.
To select text on a PC
It’s the same!
When proofreading content, you’ll often notice words you overuse. You might also spot misspellings or style errors you’ve made multiple times.
To locate specific words or phrases in your draft, you can use the “find” function that makes a search box appear on your screen.
It will list the number of instances of the words or phrases that you type in the box and direct you to each.
So, now you just need to know the keyboard shortcut for finding a word in your text.
To find a word or phrase on a Mac
Command (⌘) + F
To find a word or phrase on a PC
Ctrl + F
If you’re using a web browser with multiple open tabs, you can navigate through them easily.
To switch between tabs on a Mac
Control + Tab
To switch between tabs on a PC
Ctrl + Tab
Practice useful keyboard shortcuts
Practice useful keyboard shortcuts
With practice, these useful keyboard shortcuts become second nature and you don’t even realize you use them.
Keyboard commands can keep you in the flow of writing and editing, as well as help you improve the quality of your content faster.
