When you are writing in some verbose language, having a set of snippets that you can use is a way of speeding up your writing.

Before switching to vim, I was using IntelliJ IDEs. In those, you have some predefined snipped that are easy to use and extend. With that and autocompletion, you spend less time on the every-day tasks. Vim doesn’t have that by default. But there are plugins for it: I’ve been using snipmate and its default snippets. With that and the built-in autocompletion, I had something similar to what you can get in IntelliJ.