How checking works
What happens between the moment you type a word and the moment a suggestion appears.
Two kinds of check, one after the other
Schreibly checks your writing in two passes. They have different jobs, they run in different places, and only one of them needs a connection.
Spelling, on your device
English and German spelling is checked by the app itself, from dictionaries that ship inside it. It reacts as you finish a word, and it works with no connection at all.
Nothing about this pass leaves your computer.
Everything else needs the server
Grammar, articles, punctuation and capitalisation, and on a paid plan also casing, context, style and clarity, are checked by a language model. It does not run on your device: Schreibly’s servers pass the sentence to the AI infrastructure that hosts the model, in data centres spread across Germany and the United States and chosen by capacity, speed and price. So this pass needs a connection, and the sentence can leave the EEA while it is checked.
One sentence goes at a time, never the whole field and never the whole document.
When a sentence is sent
The unit is the sentence, not the field and not the document. That single decision is what keeps checking a long text cheap and fast.
- A sentence is sent when you finish it with a full stop, a question mark or an exclamation mark.
- If you stop typing in the middle of a sentence, it is sent after a pause of five seconds, provided it is longer than five words. A shorter fragment waits until you finish it or move on, so a search box or a two-word reply never costs a check.
- Going back into a finished sentence to change something does not send it on every keystroke. It is sent once, when you have paused for five seconds or moved on to another sentence, together with the sentence before it and the sentence after it.
- A sentence you have not touched is never sent again. Change one word and only that sentence is checked again.
- In a long document, only the text around your cursor is in scope. Opening a large file does not queue all of it.
The pause is deliberate. Every sentence that is sent is read by a language model, and a check that fired between two words would read the same sentence a dozen times while you write it. Spelling is different: it is checked on your device as you type, and never waits.
While anything is still being read, the field says it is checking rather than saying it is clean. Schreibly never reports text as fine when nothing has looked at it yet.
What the underlines mean
Three colours, and the colour says how certain Schreibly is that something is actually wrong.
Red: this is wrong
A rule of the language has been broken, and the correction is not a matter of taste.
Spelling, grammar, articles, punctuation.
Amber: this is probably wrong
The letters are right but something around them is not: the wrong case, or a real word in the wrong place.
Capitalisation, casing, context.
Blue: this is an offer
The sentence is correct as it stands. It could simply be shorter, or easier to read.
Style, clarity.
Nothing is ever changed for you. Every correction costs you a click, the red ones included, and no word is ever rewritten behind your back.
What you can do with a suggestion
Click an underlined word and a small card opens beside it. It offers one or more alternatives, and four things you can do.
- Accept
- Click a suggestion and it replaces the flagged text. Where more than one correction is plausible, the card lists them with the most likely one first.
- Ask why
- The card can explain what the mistake is and why the suggestion is right. The answer comes back in the language you pick for explanations, which is separate from the language you are writing in.
- Ignore
- Dismisses this one alert. It stays gone until you edit that piece of text yourself.
- Add to dictionary
- For a name, a username, an employer or an internal product name. Once added, the word is never flagged again, in either language and on every device where you are signed in.
What happens after you fix something
A correction changes the sentence it is in, so a repaired sentence is worth reading again. This is the rule Schreibly follows, and it is the same rule in the browser, on the Mac and on Windows.
- An underline stays until you resolve it. Nothing disappears on a timer, and a sentence is never checked again while it still has an open issue.
- When you resolve the last issue in a sentence, that sentence is checked again, together with the sentence before it and the sentence after it. Their verdicts were claims about a context that has just changed.
- Anything the new round finds behaves like the first ones. It is shown, and it stays until you resolve it.
- The loop is capped. After its rounds are spent, a sentence is left alone until you type in it again, and typing re-opens it completely.
How many automatic rounds a sentence gets depends on your plan. The free plan gets none, so a repaired sentence is not re-read until you edit it yourself. Paid plans get three.
Which language a field is checked in
Schreibly checks English and German. The choice is made per field, because one browser tab often holds both.
- The language is worked out from what is actually in the field, using the same dictionaries as the spelling pass. No download and no connection.
- Loan words do not flip it. A German sentence with English technical terms in it stays German.
- You can switch detection off in your settings and fix one language instead.
Where Schreibly never checks
Some places are excluded before anything is read. This is deliberate, not a gap waiting to be filled.
- Password fields, always and everywhere.
- Any site or app you exclude yourself. The browser extension takes a list of sites, the desktop apps take a list of applications.
- Code editors and terminals on the Mac and Windows apps. Visual Studio Code, JetBrains, Xcode, Visual Studio and terminal applications are refused before their text is read.
- Browsers, when you are using the Mac or Windows app. Checking a browser is the extension's job, and doing both would underline everything twice.
When the checker cannot be reached
A dropped connection is not the same thing as a clean text, and Schreibly does not pretend otherwise.
- Spelling keeps working. It never needed the connection in the first place.
- The field says the checker is offline instead of reporting the text as fine. Corrections you already have stay where they are, and the next edit tries again.
What happens to your text
The spelling pass never leaves your device. The deeper checks travel over an encrypted connection to Schreibly’s servers and the AI infrastructure that runs the models for us, spread across data centres in Germany and the United States — so your text can leave the EEA while it is checked. It is held in memory only: never stored, never used for training, never sold.