How to copy/paste on an iPhone

As part of that promise, there's plenty of shortcuts for easy access to certain features, as well as performing a variety of actions—including Apple's iconic Gestures, some of which may not be so intuitive unless you happen to know them.

These gestures are simply finger movements you can perform on the screen which will be recognized by your iPhone: primarily a series of taps, flicks, swipes, drags, pinches, touch-and-holds—even shaking the device! For all we know, face recognition technology may provide potential for plenty additional possibilities in the future.

In order to copy something, you've got to have it selected first—something most of you are probably already well familiar with. To select something on an iPhone, you simply place the text marker in the spot where you want to do it, and tap and hold it down until the selection box appears. From there, you can use the side markers to expand or shorten the selection to the text you want to copy.

You'll see several small prompts beneath, asking if you want to "cut, copy, paste, bold/underline," and more—this is one way to copy or paste. However, using Apple's native copy/paste finger gesture is a much quicker way of doing it, in our opinion. 

You'll just need to "pinch" in the screen with three fingers, and voilà! That is, you place three fingers anywhere on the screen and bring them together until they touch each other. That will instantly copy the text for you.

The paste gesture is even easier. You simply place the text marker where you want to paste your selection, and perform the same gesture, but this time inside out: place three fingers closely pinched together on the screen, and draw them away from each other. The text should instantly paste itself in place. 

Once you've copied and pasted an item, there's actually more than one way to use Apple's Gestures to undo that action, if you'd like to go back a step and start over. But that was it; plain and simple as it gets, wasn't it?