On my iPhone 7 using iOS 10, I can hard press on the keyboard to move the cursor around. I've noticed on a few occasions that, instead of moving the cursor around, hard pressing on the keyboard will select a paragraph of text. However, I haven't figured out what aspect of hard pressing on the keyboard triggers a paragraph to be selected.
So my question is: how can I select a paragraph of text using by hard pressing on the keyboard and using 3D Touch?
Best Answer
When you use 3D Touch, there are two levels of pressure that it can detect. In order to use the keyboard as a trackpad (to control the cursor position) you only need to press to the first level of pressure. This is important because the "deeper" or second level of pressure is what enables selecting text.
Once you have control of the cursor, move it so that you are in the middle of a word (if you weren't already). Then "click" harder on the screen and the current word will be selected. Drag the cursor around to select additional words.
To select an entire paragraph, after getting control of the cursor, you need to "triple click" just as you would on a real trackpad or with a computer mouse. The difference is the "clicks" are hard presses on the screen.