English vs. Portuguese Writing

            Up until a few days ago, I had never considered the idea that writing styles within various languages differ.  While I knew that grammar differed across foreign languages, I did not realize how drastically different essay and literature writing styles were.    

A couple days ago, I met up with Tatiana again.  Tatiana had a huge paper due that day, and wanted me to read over it and tell her what I thought of it.  She explained to me that writing a paper in English took a lot of work for her, because she first had to think through the paper in her language of Portuguese, and then translate her ideas and thoughts into English as she was writing.  In addition to this, Tatiana told me about the many differences between English and Portuguese writing.  In her native country of Brazil, Tatiana said people prefer to write long, detailed stories.  In America, especially in the corporate world, this is not the case.  We would much rather read something that cuts right to the point over something that includes too many details.  We are more familiar with Hemingway’s “iceberg theory,” and strive to tell our stories as concisely as possible.  These differences in writing styles, along with complicated grammar rules, make it difficult for an individual to write an essay in his or her nonnative language.

Tatiana’s paper was an argumentative essay about the importance of communication and healthy conflict in the workplace.  One of the first things I noticed about the paper was that a majority of the words were underlined in red.  Because Tatiana’s computer is set to her native language of Portuguese, she is unable to use spellcheck when writing her English papers.  This makes the whole writing process much more difficult, as spellcheck helps me immensely with typos and other grammatical errors when I write my papers.  I was so impressed with Tatiana’s ability to write an entire five- page paper without needing spellcheck.

Overall, Tatiana did an amazing job with her paper.  Her English grammar was basically flawless, and she did a great job outlining the thesis and the main points in her paper.  If I had read the paper without knowing who wrote it, I would definitely not have been able to tell that the writer’s native language was not English.  Tatiana was worried about the quality of her paper as she has not had much prior experience with English essay writing, but I assured her that she did an incredible job and created a well-written paper.

I helped Tatiana fix some of the grammatical errors in her paper (there weren’t many), and then after that she told me how stressed she was for finals.  The IEP students take their finals one week earlier than all the other students.  Tatiana explained that the studying process takes much longer for her classes here than in Brazil, because when she takes classes in English, she has to translate words as she is studying.  Instead of just initially learning things in her native language of Portuguese, she has to first translate the English notes she was given and her English texts into Portuguese, and then study them.  This really elongates the studying process, and makes it much more difficult to study for finals.

As stressed as I am about finals, I cannot imagine having to take my finals in a nonnative language.  Studying is a long and difficult enough process as it is, and having to translate everything while I am studying would frustrate and discourage me from wanting to learn and succeed.  I give a lot of credit to the IEP students for being willing to take on and accomplish this difficult task. 

As always, I enjoyed being able to sit down with Tatiana and further learn about her and her culture, and I am fortunate to be able to participate in the conversation partner program.