Writer's Workbench Reviewer's Comments

Avoid failures in communication with Writers Workbench. This program by EMO Solutions can help you write with purpose and focus, our “TopTenREVIEWS Gold Award” winner offers more grammar and style checks than any other editing program.

This adept program is the perfect editing assistance, whether you’re writing a proposal, an email, an essay or simply teaching others how to write them. With Writers Workbench, you can choose from 27 analysis tools and 29 STEPS Self Tutoring Educational Preparation Steps.

Not only can this program help you correct grammar and syntax errors but it also offers relevant word or phrase alternatives to hone or enhance your writing.  It also works flawlessly with Microsoft Word.

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Editing Tools:  

Writer’s Workbench catches more spelling and grammar errors than Word or other popular word processors. The program will check your document looking at each sentence as a whole for clarity, spelling errors, grammatical mistakes and misused words. The software also checks for overall organization and style.

You can spend hours performing all 27 analyses and 29 STEPS or pick and choose the analysis and steps you want to focus on. When your professor tells you that you need to work on your sentence structure or your boss says he cannot understand your emails, you can easily utilize this program to create effective and correct content.

Writer’s Workbench is a useful program for refining business and professional writing in the comfort of your home and/or office. The layout of the analyses is designed to lead you through the organization and development of your paper before moving on to checking grammar such as sentence structure and punctuation.

Teachers can use Writer’s Workbench in many ways to heighten student’s knowledge of language and writing skills. You can use some or all of the analysis as you are teaching a concept or you can use STEPS to provide assistance.

Writer’s Workbench can relate the percent of simple or complex sentences, how many “to be” verbs used and more.

Feedback:  

Writer’s Workbench out performed our expectations. We tested three writing samples and received useful results. The program automatically detected what kind of document we were editing and gave us helpful hints on how to make the text more concise.

This software lets you know the reason for your error, gives more than one correction, a looks at the content or meaning of the sentence and has the ability to distinguish between words like “affected” or “effected” and homophones such as “its” and “it’s.” Writer’s Workbench can also detect subject and verb agreement. We found the corrections helpful and valid.

Reference Tools:  

When you are not sure if you want to accept a suggestion, check the rule in the provided grammar guide. The comprehensive guide included in the program contains the rules of English grammar, punctuation and discussions on effective writing techniques. There is also a built–in dictionary and thesaurus to help you with word choice.

Self–Tutoring Exploration and Preparation Steps (STEPS) includes interactive documents that identify the kind of information that each analysis provides. These Steps can help you develop an understanding of the concepts and rules you will need in order to make revisions in your documents.

Additional Tools:  

Writer’s Workbench provides you with Self–Tutoring Exploration and Preparation Steps (STEPS), which include interactive documents that explain the kind of feedback each analysis provides. These Steps help you develop an understanding of style concepts and grammar rules, so you can avoid common mistakes and improve your writing.

Writer’s Workbench can help you enrich your text by offering tips on how to fix common grammar mistakes. Additionally, it can help you remove redundant phrases, over used words, and help to make your work clean and clear.

This software provides you with memo, business letter and email templates perfect for any professional use. Other popular templates include those for essays, research papers, and formal letters.

This product lacks a citation guide or generator, but it does have many other useful features.

Applications:  

Writer’s Workbench can be used with Microsoft Word 97 or higher. However, this product is not Macintosh compatible, which is unfortunate since many schools are given free Apple computers.

This program can be used with any type of writing, including business, scholarly and professional. However, we found it most applicable for educational use.

Help/Support:  

EMO Solutions offers nine user guides, including a middle school, high school and a teachers’ manual. For all users they include a 16 page manual with a one–page quick start guide posted online.

We found Writer’s Workbench’s support team prompt and helpful. They can be contacted by phone, fax or email or you can go online and access help, tutorials, user guides and FAQs. Additionally, over 24 “fellow educators” have consented to have their contact information posted online and they “would love to talk with you about how they use Writer’s Workbench.”

Summary:  

Writer’s Workbench has a long list of useful features that will appeal to students business, professionals and faculty members. It is a bit of a challenge and takes more time to use to get the full potential, but has manuals, guides and brochures to help you along the way. When you accomplish this, you may impress your peers, professors, clients and maybe your boss with your writing improvement

This program is comprehensive, making it a useful tool for teachers covering grammar; however, it may be more than what some individual writers need. If you have the patience to learn this program and go through the 27 checks, this software offers useful feedback and instruction for all applications. But if you want a more streamlined, yet effective program try Editor.