I was just informed by MikeD (about 2 minutes ago) that much like Ctrl-arrow which you can use to jump around typed text, you can also use Ctrl-Backspace to delete whole words at a time. I suppose this is not too different than using Ctrl-Shift-arrow to select text and then hitting Delete or Backspace, but it is more key efficient.
I wonder what other neat keyboard shortcuts are lurking out there...