Background:

spelling rules are important in all spheres of life, especially during professional training.

Objective:

to characterize the spelling problems in Chilean students of the initial cycle belonging to health degrees.

Methods:

non-experimental, descriptive and cross-sectional study. Theoretical and empirical methods were applied: the review of 104 narratives written by the subjects under study, of the specialties of Nutrition, Kinesiology and Phonoaudiology. The analysis categories resulted from an adaptation of those applied by Sotomayor et al. (2013). From them, stress, use of c/s/z/b/v/h, omission and hypo/hyper-segmentation were evaluated. Data were expressed in absolute and percentage frequencies.

Results:

in general it was observed that students share similar values regarding the most frequent errors; in the stressing of words, those committed in the last syllable predominated in more than half of the sampled ones, while the less frequent ones corresponded with the diacritical accent; the lowest frequency of faults was in the segmentation. Nutrition students contributed with the highest percentage of incorrectly written words.

Conclusions:

the diagnosis made allowed to characterize the prevalence of spelling errors made by the subjects under study. This constitutes the first study carried out with Chilean university students of health sciences. It is necessary to deepen these investigations to generate contextualized strategies with the purpose of minimizing the frequency of errors or eradicating this deficiency.

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