Alice Hagger won’t tell you she’s a spelling freak. However, the subject is sensitive for this brand strategy manager, who supports companies in developing their identity. “My job is to tell stories through words, explains the 30-year-old from Paris, who worked for the biggest advertising agencies and is now self-employed. So I have a very personal relationship with the French language. » She owes to learning Latin, from college to khâgne, to have understood French, to the point of never making mistakes again. “The spelling says something very intimate, which often goes back to childhood, she says. A boss who makes mistakes invites us to question his credibility, his legitimacy, his exemplarity. I wouldn’t see myself pointing out to a superior that he made a mistake, at the risk of making him lose face. » Nor to some of his clients, although in management positions, who seem angry with the conjugation or the syntax.
According to studies by the Voltaire barometer, regularly published by the personalized online spelling refresher service, the French mastered 45% of grammatical and lexical rules in 2015, compared to 51% in 2010. Several studies, including that of Textmaster in 2013 , show that nine out of ten e-mails contain errors in French. In fifteen years, Alice Hagger has noticed a drop in the level of spelling among the writers and creatives with whom she collaborates. To the point of having to advise them to take online courses on LinkedIn Learning, for example, which offers sixteen thousand.
The most frequent mistakes made by Alice Hagger recruits, from Sup de Pub, Celsa or field sales, concern the concordance of tenses, conjugation and agreements of the past participle. “Today, I run tests before recruiting, asking to write a presentation text, confides the manager, who worked three years for an online furniture sales company. I led teams that wrote product sheets. When there are mistakes on the cards, some customers have explained to us that they give up buying, for fear that it is a counterfeit. »
An economic cost
A poor spelling level of employees has an economic cost for companies. What confirms an Ipsos report on employers’ expectations in terms of expression, published in October 2021. For 86% of recruiters, their employees’ mastery of written and oral expression as well as spelling is fundamental. It is in the top 5 recruitment criteria, almost at the same level as technical skills. Three-quarters of employers are confronted with spelling deficiencies in their teams on a daily basis, with repercussions on credibility and professional effectiveness and consequences on the company’s reputation, productivity and even financial performance. Shortcomings in spelling and written expression would therefore be barriers to hiring. For 73% of decision makers surveyed, skills in French are a priority, far ahead of fluency in English (33%). However, one thing is certain: teleworking and remote written exchanges, much more numerous since the health crisis, make faults more visible.
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