✍️ Writing

Say you're a solarpunk writer without an editor, but still want a second pair of eyes to proof read your writings.

A grammar checking program can be very useful to catch things that you may miss even after doing a full pass of your work. And to clarify, a grammar checker differs from a spell checker, in that it can spot differences in past vs. present tense, active vs. passive voice, style, and incorrect use of a word within the context of a sentence.

Unfortunately, there are few options on the market currently for creative writers, as most are catered toward business or technical writing. Let's take a look at what's currently out there.

ProWritingAid

First up is ProWritingAid. It's often touted as the premier option for fiction authors, but at $400 for a lifetime license, I'd bet it's likely out of reach for most. A monthly subscription could be used temporarily on a book-by-book basis, but personally I despise subscriptions, and refuse to consider it for my own use.

I purchased the lifetime license to trial it a couple years ago, and found it to have many false positives, to be extremely buggy (both as a browser extension and in its own native app), and unergonomic to actually use due to poor UI and layout. It made going through a lengthy manuscript a chore. To add insult to injury, they have since gone full-hog into adding AI into the program instead of focusing on usability or stability.

Overall, an absolute ripoff for the high price. To their credit, they did honor their refund policy quickly and easily.

Grammarly

I found Grammarly's free service to be superior to ProWritingAid in regards to UI and UX, but it's only available as a subscription to access all the grammar features, and they have also gone the AI route, deeply integrating it into the app. Lastly, I experienced quite a few false positives or conflicts with style, making it still not ideal for creative writers. That combined with the AI and subscription requirement make it a No-Go for me.

Quillbot

Last is Quillbot, which produced perhaps the best results of the three, even with the free service. Unfortunately it also requires a subscription for advanced grammar checking, and uses AI. Most critically, it's not a local service, meaning you're putting your entire manuscript up in a cloud somewhere. Only the expensive Team License gets you Data control. No-go.

That's pretty much everything worth mentioning on the market, so what now? Forgo a grammar checker entirely? Put up with a subscriptions and using AI?

The surprising answer brings us back to the 90's, more specifically, to an old tool called Grammatik

Grammatik was once a stand-alone grammar checker from the early 80's, but was later purchased by WordPerfect (WP) and incorporated into the WordPerfect Office Suite (which still exists to this day, though mainly used by Lawyers nowadays). As these old versions of WP are long abandoned, they're now available for free as abandonware for anyone to use.

The versions of Grammatik we'll be focusing on are the ones included with Wordperfect 6.2 for DOS, and Wordperfect 8 for Linux.

First we'll cover the Linux version from 1998, then the DOS version from 1996.

WordPerfect 8 for Linux

Example of using WP8 in the terminal as a Word Processor.

WP8 for Linux was exclusively a Terminal program, and fortunately for us, a lovely chap by the name of Tavis Ormandy packaged it up for various modern linux distros, making it trivial to install and run from the terminal. You can find the github repo for it down below.

• Updated and repackaged WP8 for Linux Github repo - Go to the Releases page and download either the .Deb or .RPM package, depending on your distro. Once installed, simply open a terminal (xTerm seemed to have better compatibility) and type wp.

This is by far the easiest way to get access to Grammatik (if you're on Linux), and will likely serve the needs of most people with the least amount of fuss. However, the older DOS version is actually a little more full-featured.

If you're on OSX or Windows, you'll need to use the DOS version.

Wordperfect 6.2 for DOS

Example of DOS Grammatik in actual use.

~~Included in the this older version of Grammatik was the ability to provide an example document to act as a writing style guide, which is a feature I haven't seen replicated in any other other program. In comparison, WP8's Grammatik only lets you select from a list of writing style presets (fiction, documentation, business letter, etc)~~ EDIT: after further testing, this is actually not true. You can only set an example document to compare your writing and the example's writing on a Flesch-Kincaid Readability score, which isn't nearly as useful compared to what I thought it did. However, the DOS version remains a bit more full featured, as it gives more detailed advice compared to newer versions of Grammatik.

WP6.2 is also freely available as abandonware, but since it's for DOS, you'll need to do a few extra steps to get it working, like using a DOS emulator (learning some basic DOS commands would also be helpful).

Here's what you'll need to get it running:

• The WordPerfect 6.2 installer file

A DOS Emulator:

• Linux: DOSemu2 will be the easiest way to run WP6.2 on Linux, with complete and seamless integration. However it only supports Ubuntu, Fedora, and openSUSE. If you're on Debian or Arch, you may want to use DOSBox-X or DOSBox Staging.

• Windows & Mac: DOSBox-X or DOSBox Staging are the best options for non-Linux platforms. If you'd prefer, there are DOSBox GUI's that can negate the need to know DOS commands, such as DBGL, though I haven't tried these personally.

For a more complete guide, I'd recommend taking a look at Edward Mendelson's website, which features incredibly thorough instructions on getting WP6.2 perfectly integrated into modern OS's. Though bear in mind he wants to actually use it as a word processor, printer support and all. (Off topic, but Mendelson is a pretty cool dude. Used to write for PC Magazine back in the 80's and 90's, and is a college professor who gave a great talk about us moving toward a Surveillance Society

We can safely ignore the more in-depth stuff, since we just want to use Grammatik, so you don't need to bother going any further than getting the program itself up and running.

Conclusions

With no good open-source options, I like to think going back to using an old feature complete piece of software, made before user analytics or subscriptions were even a twinkle in an executive's eye, is actually kinda solarpunk.

It rejects the endless churn of modern software constantly trying to reinvent the wheel just to trick you out of more money which, in realty, just gets you an inferior tool, despite the fact that the old tool is nearly 30 years old. It also avoids contributing to climate change by avoiding the use of an AI in some datacenter needlessly wasting electricity and water to do something an ancient 8088 could've done in your home.

Grammatik likely isn't perfect; you'll still get some false positives, and you still need an eye for editing to be able to make executive decisions, but it's pretty darn good at what it does.

Hopefully one day it can be properly replaced with a modern open-source implementation that really does provide an advancement over the old. But as of right now, it's a solid tool to have in your belt as a writer, and certainly worth giving a try.