Texting friends, replying to a business email, tapping out some text for a social media post – we do a lot of writing on our smartphones, which are increasingly essential for our work and personal lives. But did you know about the many keyboard tips and tricks that can help raise your smartphone skills? If you own an Apple iPhone, there are a host of little-known shortcuts that could maximize your typing.

Slide Instead of Type

Typing is not the only way to enter text into an iPhone. Apple’s Quickpath feature lets you write by sliding your finger around the screen’s digital keyboard, instead of tapping and lifting your fingers on the electronic letters. To use it, touch the first letter of the word and then, while still touching the screen, slide your finger to the following letters.

Turn the Keyboard into a Trackpad

You wrote a sentence and realized you forgot a word and want to add it in? Or perhaps you wrote a long paragraph and want to make edits before hitting send? To move the cursor to the part of the text you want to modify, hold your thumb down on the space bar until the letters disappear, or hold it down inside the text bubble.

Copying and Pasting

If you want to select text that you’ve typed on your iPhone for copying and pasting, there are a few options. You probably know you can tap twice on a word to highlight it, or three times to highlight a whole paragraph.

Original reporting: Texarkana Gazette — read the source article.