Avoiding Bad Word Processing Habits

In today's world of text messages and social networking sites, many contractions and abbreviations have crept into the language in order to save time and space. Caution should be taken that these time-savers do not become habit forming and crop up in your word processing.

A year or so ago a well known football website received many plaudits for its witty headline, 'Mrtn Skrtl Dmgs Lgmnts'. This headline, in case you are wondering, refers to Liverpool's Slovakian centre-back Martin Skrtl, and it should read 'Martin Skrtl Damages Ligaments', but as there are no vowels in the surname Skrtl, the wag of a writer decided it would be fun to remove all the other vowels from the headline too - and it worked, as everyone understood it and, indeed, it did raise many a smile.

For in this age of text messages and social networking a whole new language has sprung up where missing letters do not prevent communication from being understood. Indeed, text speak is a useful tool in the very limited world of the SMS message. Saying 'WUU2 M8' may make as much sense as a car number plate to the uninitiated, but to type this out in full, 'what are you up to, mate?' would use up considerably more of that valuable message space.

Social networking sites and chat rooms have also thrown up modifications to the language, many of which are now in common use; although there are others that I hope never catch on. There is a chat room term, at least here in the north-east, the three-lettered 'ano', which means 'I know,' and which can be seen in such aberrations as 'ano wot u mean'.

My love of the English language is too great to allow such words into my typing, no matter how pressed for time or space I am, but I do sometimes use little typing shortcuts that I have to be wary of becoming habit-forming. For example, I often type the word 'fone' instead of 'phone' and 'nite' instead of 'night', and I even tap in an occasional @ where I mean to say 'at'. These spellings are perfectly acceptable in the world of chat rooms, Facebook and MSN, but over use of them may see them creep into more important documents, and it would not do to type into a job application letter that in a previous post you used to 'man the fones @ the all nite taxi rank'. I would advise caution, therefore, in case adaptations such as these become habit and creep into other areas of communication, such as word processing.

But it is not only what you type that can cause the development of bad habits, sometimes how you type can have an undesirable effect in the long term too.

If your AutoCorrect settings tell it to, Word will automatically capitalise the initial letter of any word that follows a full stop, and if you type a stand-alone lower-case letter i, then it will automatically capitalise that too, to denote the first person singular. With Word doing all of this work, you may think that your typing rate will be increased as you no longer have to hold down the Shift key when starting a new sentence or referring to yourself.

However, this is not really a great time-saving measure and over-reliance upon it can be counter-productive. You may get into the habit of starting each new sentence without pressing the Shift key, but then you might come across a program that has no auto-capitalisation function, or, heaven forbid, a manual typewriter, and you will have to readjust into pressing that Shift key again. There are also many abbreviations that end in a full stop but which do not take a capital letter for the following word (tbsp. inc. etc.) and if your settings do not instruct otherwise, then a capital letter will follow, and more time will be wasted in correcting this than would have been spent in pressing the Shift key.

You can explore the whole world of AutoCorrect, or indeed, switch it off altogether, by going to Tools/AutoCorrect Options. The dialog box has tick boxes for allowing or disallowing various AutoCorrect functions, and the Exceptions box displays a list of those abbreviations with full stops that do not take a capital letter for the following word.

Microsoft Word has a wide range of functions that can save time and increase efficiency, but perhaps some of these should not be used at the cost of altering how you type. The use of AutoCorrect could be investigated further on a Microsoft Word training course, but in the meantime I would recommend that you continue to capitalise manually, in order to maintain good practice.