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Writer's Workbench
Original author(s) Lorinda Cherry,
Nina Macdonald
Developer(s) AT&T Bell Laboratories
Operating system Unix
Available in English
Type Grammar checker

The Writer's Workbench (wwb) is a grammar checker created by Lorinda Cherry and Nina Macdonald of Bell Labs. It is perhaps the earliest grammar checker to receive wide usage on Unix systems.

Capabilities

wwb's utilities were capable of analysing text for parts of speech, and for word and sentence length, and of comparing the results to established norms.

The Writer's Workbench was meant to help students learn to edit their work:

My feeling about a lot of those tools is their value in education is as much pointing out to people who are learning to write that they have choices and make choices when they do it. They don't think of a writing task as making choices per se. Once they get it on paper they think it's cast in stone. So it makes them edit.

Polling at Colorado State University in the 1980s indicated that wwb was well received by students and faculty. Additional analysis in the 1980s indicated close correlation between wwb's assessments and essay grading rubrics.

Package contents

As of 1983, the wwb package contained 29 utilities. As of 1986, this had increased to around 35–40 utilities:

Command Description
abst Analyzes documents for abstractness.
acro Finds acronyms in text files.
conscap Identifies inconsistent capitalization.
consist Identifies inaccuracies in trademarks and inconsistent capitalization between British English and American English.
conspell Identifies inconsistent use of British and American spelling.
continge Analyzes text for contingencies in procedural documents.
continrls Presents information about how contingencies can be displayed as if-then lists or decision trees.
dictadd Adds words to the dictionaries used by diction, sexist, spellwwb and tmark.
diction Identifies wordy sentences and suggests how they may be simplified.
diversity Analyzes word frequencies to provide a measure of the number of distinct words, and generates an output file ranking how often particular words occurred.
double Identifies accidental repeated occurrences of the same word, such as "the the" or "and and".
findbe Identifies uses of the verb "to be" (see E-Prime).
gram Identifies misused articles and split infinitives.
match Compares outputs from the style command to statistically compare writing styles between documents.
mkstand Analyzes a "well-written" document to generate a standard for use by the prose command.
morestyle Analyzes text by running the abst, diversity, neg and topic commands.
murky Analyzes procedural documents to identify difficult sentences.
neg Identifies negations in text.
org Processes documents to produce condensed versions that show the document's organization.
parts Analyzes documents to assign parts of speech to each word.
proofr Invokes the spellwwb, punct, double, diction and gram commands to perform automatic proofreading.
proofvi Invokes the spellwwb, punct, double and diction commands to provide interactive error correction.
prose Describes the writing style of a document.
prosestnd Displays the standards used by the prose command.
punct Checks punctuation of documents.
punctrls Displays punctuation rules.
reroff Converts formatted text into nroff format.
sexist Identifies sexist terms and suggests alternatives.
spelladd Adds words to the personal dictionary used by spellwwb.
spelltell Finds the correct spelling of a word.
spellwbb Enhanced version of the spell command that can process multiple files.
splitrls Displays information about split infinitives.
style Analyzes style characteristics of documents.
switchr Analyzes documents to identify words used as both nouns and verbs.
syl Analyzes documents to produce a list of every word used along with the number of syllables of each word.
tmark Identifies incorrectly used trademarks.
tmarkrls Displays information about rules for the correct use of trademarks.
topic Lists the most frequent nouns in a document to give some idea about its topic.
worduse Displays information about correct use of words and phrases.
wwb Invokes the proofr and prose commands to provide a complete report on a document and suggested improvements.
wwbaid Online help system for the Writer's Workbench.
wwbhelp Searches for help on a particular Writer's Workbench topic.
wwbinfo Displays a complete summary of the Writer's Workbench suite.

History and successors

The wwb package was included with AT&T UNIX in the late 1970s and early 1980s and received wide distribution as a result. However, wwb was not included with Version 7 Unix. Various successors arose, based closely upon wwb, such as the commercial Grammatik packages for IBM PCs.

The GNU operating system contains free software implementations of several wwb utilities, such as spell, style and diction. As of early 2019, the look utility had not yet been ported to GNU, but its implementation from 4.4BSD-Lite is available as free software, for example via Debian.

See also

  • LanguageTool
  • Programmer's Workbench (PWB/UNIX)
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