Employees 'should watch their language'

It has been suggested that staff should watch their written language while in the workplace.

According to the results of a study by software firm WhiteSnake, a majority of correspondence (60 per cent) from businesses continues to contain either spelling mistakes or grammatical errors.

The organisation believes that a number of mistakes are a consequence of firms making use of spellcheckers from free word-processing software.

"The most prevalent error type has turned out to be 'missing words', with 32 per cent of writers failing to use all the words needed for a grammatically correct sentence," said Liran Brenner, vice president of research and development at WhiteSmoke.

Amit Greener, vice president of marketing and sales at WhiteSmoke, added: "As part of raising the writing standards in organisations, every email or memo sent by a staff member should be proofed beforehand."

The organisation's findings were based upon an analysis of 5,000 texts.

A number of free word-processing software solutions are available, including Open Office, a suite with its origins in a package known as StarOffice.