The Writer's Workbench (wwb) is a

grammar checker A grammar checker, in computing terms, is a program, or part of a program, that attempts to verify written text for grammatical correctness. Grammar checkers are most often implemented as a feature of a larger program, such as a word processor, b ...

created by

Lorinda Cherry Lorinda Cherry ( Landgraf; November 18, 1944 – February 2022) was an American computer scientist and programmer. Much of her career was spent at Bell Labs, where she was for many years a member of the original Unix Lab. Cherry developed severa ...

and Nina Macdonald of

Bell Labs Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984), then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996) and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007), is an American industrial Research and development, research and scientific developm ...

. It is perhaps the earliest

to receive wide usage on

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, an ...

systems.

Capabilities

wwb's utilities were capable of analysing text for

parts of speech In grammar, a part of speech or part-of-speech (abbreviated as POS or PoS, also known as word class or grammatical category) is a category of words (or, more generally, of lexical items) that have similar grammatical properties. Words that are ass ...

, 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:

History and successors

The wwb package was included with

AT&T UNIX The history of Unix dates back to the mid-1960s, when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, AT&T Bell Labs, and General Electric were jointly developing an experimental time-sharing operating system called Multics for the GE-645 mainframe. M ...

in the late 1970s and early 1980s and received wide distribution as a result. However, wwb was not included with

Version 7 Unix Seventh Edition Unix, also called Version 7 Unix, Version 7 or just V7, was an important early release of the Unix operating system. V7, released in 1979, was the last Bell Laboratories release to see widespread distribution before the commercial ...

, and gradually became

abandonware Abandonware is a product, typically software, ignored by its owner and manufacturer, and for which no official support is available. Within an intellectual rights contextual background, abandonware is a software (or hardware) sub-case of the ...

. Various successors arose, based closely upon wwb, such as the commercial '' Grammatik'' packages for IBM PCs. The

GNU GNU () is an extensive collection of free software (383 packages as of January 2022), which can be used as an operating system or can be used in parts with other operating systems. The use of the completed GNU tools led to the family of operat ...

operating system contains

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...

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.

References

Bibliography

* * * * * * Grammar checkers Unix software {{WordProcessor-stub

Capabilities

Package contents

History and successors

See also

References

Bibliography