This study of orthographic practices, concerning people with difficulties in writing, is part of a doctoral research project, funded by the Rhône-Alpes region, in which the results of a spelling test, proposed to the most disadvantaged writing respondents in the IVQ survey conducted by INSEE in 2011, is analysed. After presenting the survey protocol, we will present the variation in the corpus of the Rhône-Alpes region, from the analysis of a word and a no-word which have close linguistic characteristics. We observe that, despite the heterogeneity of the results, the writers seem to have a relatively effective phonemic awareness and the frequency effect seems to have an impact on the spelling success.