How do I use the Witty editor?

The Witty editor is a text box with Witty built in. It checks your text as you type, right on the page, without the browser extension.

You find it on websites and tools that embed it. It works like the browser extension: Witty underlines words and phrases it has a suggestion for, and you decide what to change.

Suggestions

• Click an underlined word to see the explanation and the alternatives. Choose an alternative to replace the word, or ignore the suggestion.
• With the keyboard, press Alt + Shift + W to open the suggestion at the cursor.
• Long texts are checked sentence by sentence. If a text is very long, only its first part is checked, and the editor says so below the text.

The toolbar

The toolbar above the text formats it: bold, italic, underline, heading, lists and quotes, plus undo and redo. With the keyboard, the toolbar is a single stop for the Tab key; move between its buttons with the arrow keys.

The Witty logo at the end of the toolbar shows what Witty is doing: it moves while Witty checks the text, and turns into a warning sign if the check failed. Screen readers announce the number of suggestions when a check is done.

The Witty menu

Click the Witty logo, or press the down arrow key on it, to open the menu:

• Settings: the categories Witty checks and your preferences, such as the gender format, spelling and grammar, and AI suggestions. See How do I customize Witty?
• Switch gender format: rewrite a German or French text into another gender format (see below).
• Help: this page.
• About Witty: the Witty Works website.

Press Escape to close the menu or a panel; the focus returns to the Witty logo.

Switch the gender format of a text

Say your text uses the gender star (Lehrer*innen) and you need it with a colon (Lehrer:innen), or your French text uses enseignant.e.s and you need enseignant·es. Instead of changing every form by hand:

1. Open the Witty menu and choose Switch gender format.
2. Choose the format you want. Witty offers the formats of your text's language:
   • German: slash, slash with dash, gender gap, gender star, colon, parentheses with or without dash, Binnen-I, and the Inklusivum (Lehrerne).
   • French: the point médian (enseignant·es, enseignant·e·s), the dot (enseignant.es, enseignant.e.s) and the slash (enseignant/es, enseignant/e/s).
   A text with both languages gets both lists.

Witty checks the whole text and rewrites it in one step: gendered forms in another format, the articles that go with them, roles written in the masculine only (Der Lehrer becomes Die:der Lehrer:in, le directeur becomes la·le responsable), and pairs such as “Schüler und Schülerinnen” or “les enseignantes et les enseignants”, which become Schüler:innen and les enseignant·es. The chosen format also becomes your gender format setting for that language. To go back, press Undo once: the whole switch is undone.

Witty leaves alone what it should not decide for you: feminine forms that may name a particular woman (die Lehrerin), forms of address (Frau Meier) and pronouns.

The Inklusivum

Switching into the Inklusivum changes nouns and articles: Lehrer*innen becomes Lehrerne, die*der becomes de, jede/-r becomes jedey. Some words stay as they are, because Witty cannot convert them reliably yet: compounds such as Mitarbeiter*innenbefragung, and words Witty does not know. Read the text through afterwards. Switching from the Inklusivum to another format is not possible yet; Witty tells you if you try.

When Witty does not switch

• If only part of a very long text was checked, only that part is switched, and Witty tells you.
• If your organisation sets the gender format for you, Witty changes nothing and tells you which format your organisation uses.
• If your organisation has turned these suggestions off for your account, Witty tells you that switching is turned off.
• If the Witty server you are connected to does not support a format yet, Witty tells you and marks the format in the list.

Your API key

Some tools ask for a Witty API key to use the editor. The editor keeps it in memory only: it is never stored in your browser, and it is sent only to the Witty server the tool is connected to.