Writing clearly in two languages

If your day involves English in the morning and German in the afternoon — or the other way around — you've probably noticed something most writing tools haven't: clear writing isn't the same in both. A perfectly fine English sentence becomes a clumsy German one the moment you translate it word-for-word, and vice versa.

Two languages, two sets of habits

English rewards short sentences, active verbs and a single clear idea per paragraph. German tolerates longer sentences but punishes you for ambiguous references and misplaced commas. A tool that only switches dictionaries between en-GB and de-DE misses everything that actually makes the text good.

What schreibly checks

We treat each variant — en-GB, en-US, de-DE, de-AT, de-CH — as its own thing, not a flavour of a parent language. The checker looks at grammar, spelling, punctuation and style with rules tuned to the variant you've picked, and surfaces the same issues the same way across the extension, the web app and the desktop app.

Switching languages mid-document

You're allowed to. schreibly detects the language of each block and applies the right ruleset, so a quoted German paragraph inside an English email doesn't get flagged as one long spelling mistake. We'll write more about how that detection works in a future post.