Time-saving MacBook tips for writers

Writing is one of those activities for which, every trick to save time and resources, is fair game when the goal is to focus all energy into the topic at hand. Most writing, both professional and casual, is done in public places, where writers have to struggle with noise and other environmental distractions.

Those who do most of their writing on a MacBook, may or may not be aware of a few handy tips that will save time, and optimize their workflow.

Summarize

Often times writers need to get the jest of a long body of text, as quickly as possible, for instance when one needs to write a technical review, a tutorial, or even a term paper for school. Summarizing text the traditional way can be a tedious and often long affair, especially when the text is several pages long. Depending on the timeframe available, summarizing in a hurry could even lead to embarrassing mistakes at press time. Fortunately, OS X offers the perfect tool for this task.

To summarize a body of text, we can simply highlight any text, then click on “Services” in the drop down menu, and click “Summarize”. A text box will then appear, showing a summary of the highlighted text. The resulting summary can be as dense or as sparse as one requires.

Create a richer dictionary

When writing technical papers or other documents that contain a number of terms that may not exist in the vocabulary of your Mac, writers are faced with having to deal with annoying red squiggly lines, under words that they know are correct. this can be frustrating, as it is a distraction that most writers can do without.

A little known trick to MacBook owners, is to use the Terminal window and issue the following command:

“open ~/Library/Spelling/”

This command will lead users to a file called “LocalDictionary”, in which volumes of custom terms can be added. One caveat is that the words must be added in alphabetical order.

Voice Notes

Creative writing is one of those situations where the dictation feature in a MacBook is surprisingly applicable. Often ideas come to us at odd times, and in situations where typing might take too long when all it’s needed is taking quick notes of a “fugit” inspiration.

MacBook owners have at their disposal, the ability to set a specific key that will activate voice dictation, to use voice commands to open quickly an application where they can dictate their thoughts for later retrieval, which can be set up in the “Dictation and Speech” section of the settings.