Wondering how to use the Text Expander List?
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Our secret text expander list has over 550 text expanders for you to reference as you build your own text expander list. We are big believers in personalizing your abbreviations for your expanders and adding them slowly, one at a time, so you remember them.
So, we created this guide not to do the work for you, but for you to get ideas of common words, phrases, questions, and verbs. As you’re transcribing, listen to words that you hear again and again, and add them to your text expanders.
Once a week, go through this list to get ideas for more expanders. If it’s hard for you to remember my abbreviations, create abbreviations that make sense to you. This reference is broken down into sections of 15 words each, except for the end of the section, which might have less.
I went through my own list of text expanders and sorted them by how often I used them. I then put them in groups of the most common words, frequently used words, and common words, and sorted them alphabetically. You’ll see that most of the text expanders, except for very common words like can or does, which are also short, are longer words, where I save the most keystrokes by using text expanders.
The most common words section has a lot of smaller, onekey expanders for extremely popular words, like no, then, other, and more. Many of these use only one key, but you can add a second key if you want. There is no right or wrong way to remember abbreviations, only what comes most naturally to you.
After the most Common words sections is the Frequently Used Words. These are words that are, again, sorted and used slightly less than the most common words. Just as in the previous section, these words don’t have any verbs in them, which come in a later section. The common words list is a long section of words.
Don’t worry if it takes you a long time to get through these lists and add them to your text expanders. I built mine up for months, and I’m still adding words or phrases as I use them. After the common words, we get to the contractions section. Using text expanders for contractions is very helpful because typing in the apostrophe key over and over can get annoying and waste your time. Now, we’re finally onto verbs.
What I’ve listed are just the base verbs. And so, if you’re using AutoCorrect, you’ll have to add your own suffixes. You can either add the suffixes when you add the base word, or you can add them as you use them in transcripts. Some verbs can also be nouns. For example, treat can turn into treatment. So, if you use “tx” for a treat, I would use “txm” for treatment, even though it’s not technically a noun. Interviews, especially, are full of questions. This section goes over some common question phrases that come up in interviews. Add more questions as you hear them in transcripts. Phrases are where you really save time in transcription. The first part of the phrases text expanders that I’ve put together are I Phrases.
These are phrases that begin with the word I, such as: I don’t know or I don’t have. After the I phrases section, there are you phrases, which are similar to the I phrases, except they begin with “you”. This section includes your more common general phrases. Phrases such as a little bit, or a lot of, come up frequently. The key is recognizing them as you transcribe. These phrases also include phrases that you’ll find often in transcription, such as “thank you for, ” or “I look forward to talking.”
It also includes other phrases common to conversations. Again, this is only a starting point. Continue to look for phrases in your transcripts to really shave time off your transcribing ratio. The last section of this download is the markings section.
This is very short, since how you mark transcripts can vary depending on the company you’re working for or the clients you have. For example, it was helpful for me to set up a keyboard shortcut for adding dashes to sentences by just using “dd” instead of finding the dash’s key at the top of my keyboard.
I also had a contract where I had to mark the text red. And so I would highlight a word or phrase and then use a shortcut to change the color to red.
Be creative in how to save keystrokes and add shortcuts to your transcripts in your punctuations and markings. Now that we’ve gone over text expanders, I hope you use this list to slowly add to your own text expander list and be constantly thinking about how you can save time typing. Try to use a few text expanders of your own in the next practice file.
