abab, aaz, aab, aabz

A while back an IT user posted that he was using aab or something like that for 2 word phrases. Naturally this intrigued me as a person with an inordinate interest in short forms. :) But he didn't leave his email address, as I recall, and the discussion petered out.

A phrase rule that starts with the first letter of each word does have an advantage in IT, given IT's Phrase Advisory logic - first letter of each word. I would certainly be open to trying one a rule other than abab which can make for some backkeying occasionally, although I find it works very well in IT.

(In the traditional 2 column hidden screen expander, I believe abab is better than a 3 letter rule for 2 word phrases. A rule like aaz or aab will find too many duplicates since in most expanders all the short and long forms for all the words and phrases are put into one list. In IT, of course, the words can be kept in a separate advisory or accessed with a different rule in the Phrase advisory, both of which the ABCZ Typing Assistant takes advantage of.)

That said, I think a-ab (or a-abz) should be considered too. One reason is that a-ab is faster to type than a-az. Why? Because you have to glance over to the last letter (or pause very briefly, mentally) and type it. Our fingers are so used to typing those initial letters that the second and third letter are almost "free". (That is one reason I feel abcz is a particularly good rule for words. True there is z there in ABCZ, but you need to indicate the ending somehow and z is better than typing Shift and a special letter for an ending, which some expanders require.) One issue would be, how much better disambiguation does a-az provide than a-ab, assuming it does provide more.

It's also possible that in very large lists a-abz (or possibly a-abc) would provide needed disambiguation (hey, Jean let that one of its cage originally, not me!) that a-az might not provide for 2 word phrases.

Jon

Related link: A Web Site About Typing Productivity