Composition

To Express Ideas in an Organized Written Form  Portuguese composition is culturally based and has its own logic. It may manifest itself in verbal or written communications in English. Kaplan (1972) points out that rhetoric is a universal concept that “varies from culture to culture and even from time to time within a given culture . . . English is not a better or a worse system than any other, but it is different” (p. 247).

In written Portuguese, the sequence of thought is not linear unlike English. A topic sentence may be placed anywhere in a paragraph, from the middle to the end. Ideas are coordinated instead of subordinated and a lot of more information may be provided. This style comes across to an English teacher as disorganized and including too many irrelevant details. Before a point is made, the student may provide a lot of contextual information. Indeed, there is “a greater freedom to digress or to introduce extraneous material” (Kaplan, 1972).

This indirect writing style that native speakers of Portuguese may use in written English may be mistaken for a learning/writing “problem”, because it may look disorganized and unfocused. However, it is simply organized according to different cultural framework. The following graphic representation developed by Kaplan (1972) compares English rhetoric to the rhetoric of other romance languages including Portuguese:

Graphic Representation: Germanic and Romance Languages

Comparison of Logic Styles in Germanic vs. Romance Languages VERBAL OR WITTEN
Germanic Languages: English	Romance Languages: Portuguese, Spanish, Italian . .

Source: Kaplan, 1972 (p. 257).