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A piece of advice I read when I first started writing suggested always using short character names, especially for main characters. You’re going to have to type those names a lot, the writer said, and you don’t want to have to type Theodore repeatedly when Ted will do the trick. It seemed silly until I named a protagonist “Archimedes.” Then I understood. What a pain! Why hadn’t I called him “Archie?” Or “Arch.”  “A” would have been even better. That was in the days before word processors, though. I’m old enough to have had a manual typewriter until I went to college and traded it in for an electric–but even my electric typewriter didn’t have an autocorrect feature.

You know what I’m talking about: the feature that diligently switches your hastily typed “teh” to “the.” Hijacking autocorrect is a trick I learned when I was a technical writer. The official name of most products is ridiculously long. the common name for a program might be WriterTool, but the full name is Software.com’s WriterTool Pro 2009 for Windows. You don’t want to have to type that twice. So you add an autocorrect entry to your word processor of choice that corrects the letters “swt” to the full product name. Viola, you’ve just increased your productivity and saved yourself some typing. The same technique can be used to make it easier to type long character names. In a short story I’m working on now, “psq” becomes “Pasquale” whenever I need to type the main character’s name.

Here’s how to do it. Steps provided are for Microsoft Word, but other word processors are similar. For example, in WordPerfect, the feature is called “QuickCorrect.”

Word 2003

• Select Tools > Autocorrect Options.
• Click the Autocorrect tab.

Word 2007

• Click the Office button.
• Click the Word Options button.
• In the left pane, click Proofing.
• Click the Autocorrect Options button.
• Click the Autocorrect tab.*

Then…

• In the Replace box, enter an easily typed two or three letter abbreviation for your unfortunately-named character.
• In the With field, enter the character’s full name as you’d like it to appear.
• Click Add.

After you close the dialog, type the three-letter abbreviation you entered in the Replace box. When you hit the space bar or type any punctuation mark, the abbreviation will be replaced with the character’s full name. Now isn’t that easier?

My motto is, “Higher productivity through laziness.” Happy writing, and join us next time on “The Lazy Writer” when… Oh, who am I kidding? If there’s a second Lazy Writer post, I’ll be surprised.
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*As you can see, Microsoft’s claim that Word 2007 is more efficient than previous versions is correct…  If by “more efficient,” you mean, “it takes twice as many steps to accomplish the same thing.”