Consider a typical week in academia: You’re reviewing multiple thesis drafts, responding to prospective students, writing recommendation letters, and providing consistent feedback on student assignments. A single piece of constructive feedback you commonly give – like explaining proper citation format – might be typed dozens of times. This is where text expanders for academics become invaluable.

Examples of snippets

Text expanders are software applications that take a snippet of text you type and expand them into longer pieces.

• Citation format feedback (“:cite”) “Please review APA citation formatting guidelines. Remember to include the author’s last name, year of publication, and page number for direct quotes. Your in-text citations should follow this format: (Author, YYYY, p. XX). For help, consult the library’s APA guide.”
• Meeting request response (“:mtg”) “Thank you for reaching out regarding a meeting. I hold student office hours on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 2-4pm. Please book a 20-minute slot using my calendar link: [INSERT LINK]. If these times don’t work with your schedule, let me know and we can arrange an alternative.”
• Literature review feedback (“:litrev”) “Your literature review needs stronger synthesis between sources. Rather than summarising each paper individually, try to identify themes and patterns across multiple sources. Consider how different authors’ findings relate to each other and what this tells us about the broader research landscape.”

Simpler examples for everyday writing also include:

• “:ty” to expand into “Thank you for your message”
• “:addr” could expand into your full mailing address
• “:sig” might insert your complete email signature

Lately I’ve been getting lots of prospective postgraduate students emailing me to ask about the possibility of coming to study at my university. There are two emails I have to write in response; one to the postgraduate coordinator asking them to follow up with the student, and one to the student explaining that I’ve passed the email on the coordinator. I found myself typing shorter and shorter responses to both, to the extent that they were coming across as abrupt. With a text expander I can compose the ideal emails and still save time.

Espanso

I typically recommend Espanso, an open-source, free, cross-platform text expander. The most popular text expander is probably Text Expander, which is amazing but isn’t free.

One of the features in Espanso that I really like is the concept of packages, which are a bit like libraries of snippets that others have created. For example, you can install the medical documentation package, or the emoji package. And you can create your own packages that might be useful for your community. For example, I find myself giving similar feedback to postgraduate students and have toyed with the idea of creating a ‘thesis comments’ package. Imagine installing an Espanso package with a selection of the most common comments you give your students, which you can then further edit and refine.

Text expanders for academics are more than just time-saving tools – they help maintain consistency and professionalism in our academic communications, even during the busiest periods. Whether you’re managing student inquiries, providing thesis feedback, or handling routine correspondence, implementing a text expander can transform your workflow. Start small with a few essential snippets, and you’ll quickly discover opportunities to streamline more of your academic communications.