She’s back

Unsere Sprachheldin, Spotlight Corrector Woman, ist zurück. Ihre neue Mission: das Aufspüren typischer Rec hts ch rei bf eh l er. Text von VANESSA CLARK, Illustrationen von SIMON MYERS

Corrector Woman is back, and this time with a new mission: to help you improve your spelling in English.

Thank goodness for spellcheckers and predictive text! We don’t need to be able to spell these days — or do we? Well, yes and no.

Spellcheck functions will pick up most errors, but not all. They struggle with homophones — the many pairs of words that sound the same, but have different meanings and different spellings. Not all applications have spellcheck functions anyway, and if you’re writing with pen and paper, you’re on your own.

With this in mind, let’s join Spotlight’s language superhero, Corrector Woman. After helping German intern Jakob in last year’s October issue of Spotlight, her mission this time is to help George and his German wife, Heidi, who have opened a cosy little cafe in England, serving German specialities.