Writer's Workbench


The Writer's Workbench was a software package developed for the Unix operating system by Lorinda Cherry and Nina McDonald of Bell Labs. It was 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:
CommandDescription
abstAnalyzes documents for abstractness.
acroFinds acronyms in text files.
conscapIdentifies inconsistent capitalization.
consistIdentifies inaccuracies in trademarks and inconsistent capitalization between British English and American English.
conspellIdentifies inconsistent use of British and American spelling.
contingeAnalyzes text for contingencies in procedural documents.
continrlsPresents information about how contingencies can be displayed as if-then lists or decision trees.
dictaddAdds words to the dictionaries used by diction, sexist, spellwwb and tmark.
dictionIdentifies wordy sentences and suggests how they may be simplified.
diversityAnalyzes word frequencies to provide a measure of the number of distinct words, and generates an output file ranking how often particular words occurred.
doubleIdentifies accidental repeated occurrences of the same word, such as "the the" or "and and".
findbeIdentifies uses of the verb "to be".
gramIdentifies misused articles and split infinitives.
matchCompares outputs from the style command to statistically compare writing styles between documents.
mkstandAnalyzes a "well-written" document to generate a standard for use by the prose command.
morestyleAnalyzes text by running the abst, diversity, neg and topic commands.
murkyAnalyzes procedural documents to identify difficult sentences.
negIdentifies negations in text.
orgProcesses documents to produce condensed versions that show the document's organization.
partsAnalyzes documents to assign parts of speech to each word.
proofrInvokes the spellwwb, punct, double, diction and gram commands to perform automatic proofreading.
proofviInvokes the spellwwb, punct, double and diction commands to provide interactive error correction.
proseDescribes the writing style of a document.
prosestndDisplays the standards used by the prose command.
punctChecks punctuation of documents.
punctrlsDisplays punctuation rules.
reroffConverts formatted text into nroff format.
sexistIdentifies sexist terms and suggests alternatives.
spelladdAdds words to the personal dictionary used by spellwwb.
spelltellFinds the correct spelling of a word.
spellwbbEnhanced version of the spell command that can process multiple files.
splitrlsDisplays information about split infinitives.
styleAnalyzes style characteristics of documents.
switchrAnalyzes documents to identify words used as both nouns and verbs.
sylAnalyzes documents to produce a list of every word used along with the number of syllables of each word.
tmarkIdentifies incorrectly used trademarks.
tmarkrlsDisplays information about rules for the correct use of trademarks.
topicLists the most frequent nouns in a document to give some idea about its topic.
worduseDisplays information about correct use of words and phrases.
wwbInvokes the proofr and prose commands to provide a complete report on a document and suggested improvements.
wwbaidOnline help system for the Writer's Workbench.
wwbhelpSearches for help on a particular Writer's Workbench topic.
wwbinfoDisplays 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, and gradually became abandonware. 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.