Housekeeping Rules

Charles Abbott

02 Dec 2025

This is a summary of ChuckLyn housekeeping rules designed to maximize typing speed by reducing keyboard touches.

1) Type only lower case letters and normal punctuation symbols except for “proper” nouns (names of specific persons, places and things) but not titles.

2) Avoid using symbols used to punctuate common abbreviations like etc., w/o and n.b. I think the meaning can be easily understood out of context and are unnecessary.

3) Never spell a number. Use the numeric symbols. But do use commas in numbers greater than 100 for readability.

4) Type 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th etc instead of first, second, third and fourth.

Combinations of vowels

ae ea ai ia ao oa au ua ay ya ei ie eo oe eu ue ey ye io oi iu ui iy yi ou uo oy yo My suspicion is that if any of these combinations occurs in a syllable of a word, one letter has a fair chance

Double Vowels

We already know that it is safe to drop one letter of double consonants but what about double vowels “a”, “e”, “i”, “o” and “u”? We learned in an earlier post that “oo” has the “u” sound and is written with a ”u”. I scanned the list of words output

Double Consonants

When a word contains double consonants, is it always safe to delete one letter? I did a deep dive into this topic by using a word finder tool to generate and examine a list of common words for every possible double consonant. I concluded the answer is yes with a

Sounds of “c”

If the letter “c” has a hard sound, it is written. However , if “c” has a soft sound like the letter “s”, just substitute the letter “s”. This commonly occurs when a word ends in “ce”. For example, words like face, race and nice can be shortened to fas, ras

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Combinations of vowels

Double Vowels

Double Consonants

Sounds of “c”