Writer's Workbench facts for kids
| 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) was an early computer program designed to help people improve their writing. It was like a helpful assistant for writers! This program was created by two smart people, Lorinda Cherry and Nina Macdonald, who worked at Bell Labs. It became one of the first grammar checkers that many people used on Unix computer systems.
Contents
How Writer's Workbench Helped Writers
Wwb had many useful tools that could look closely at your writing. It could check things like how long your sentences were and how many different words you used. It could also identify parts of speech, like nouns and verbs, in your text. Then, it would compare your writing to common rules for good writing.
The main goal of the Writer's Workbench was to teach students how to edit their own work. It helped them see that writing isn't just about putting words on paper. It's about making choices and improving what you've written. One of its creators said that the tools helped people realize they have choices when they write. It encouraged them to edit and make their writing better.
In the 1980s, students and teachers at Colorado State University really liked using wwb. Studies from that time showed that the program's suggestions were very similar to how teachers graded essays. This meant wwb was good at spotting areas where writing could be improved.
Tools Inside the Package
By 1983, the Writer's Workbench package had 29 different tools, also called utilities. A few years later, around 1986, this number grew to about 35 to 40 tools! Each tool had a special job to help writers. Here are some examples of what these tools could do:
| Command | What it did |
|---|---|
| abst | Looked at documents to see how abstract (or unclear) they were. |
| acro | Found acronyms (like NASA or FBI) in text files. |
| conscap | Pointed out if capitalization was used inconsistently. |
| consist | Found mistakes in trademarks and inconsistent capitalization between British English and American English. |
| conspell | Identified if British and American spelling were mixed up. |
| diction | Found sentences that were too wordy and suggested simpler ways to say them. |
| diversity | Checked how many different words were used and listed how often words appeared. |
| double | Found accidental repeated words, like "the the." |
| findbe | Identified uses of the verb "to be" (like "is," "am," "are"). |
| gram | Found misused articles (like "a," "an," "the") and split infinitives. |
| parts | Analyzed documents to figure out the part of speech for each word. |
| proofr | Ran several tools together to automatically proofread a document. |
| punct | Checked the punctuation in documents. |
| sexist | Identified words that might be considered sexist and suggested other options. |
| spellwwb | A better version of the spell command that could check many files. |
| style | Looked at the overall writing style of documents. |
| topic | Listed the most common nouns in a document to give an idea of its main subject. |
| wwb | Ran the main proofreading and style analysis tools to give a full report on a document. |
| wwbhelp | Helped users find information about specific Writer's Workbench topics. |
History and What Came Next
The Writer's Workbench program was included with AT&T UNIX computer systems in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This helped it become very popular and widely used. However, it was not included in a later version called Version 7 Unix.
After wwb, other similar programs were created. Some of these were based closely on the ideas from Writer's Workbench. For example, the commercial Grammatik programs for IBM PCs were developed later.
Today, the GNU operating system has free computer programs that do similar things to some of the wwb tools. These include programs like spell, style, and diction.
See also
- LanguageTool
- Programmer's Workbench (PWB/UNIX)
