Or at least I think it did. The exam has just finished. It was only an hour and 45 minutes. The assignment had two parts:
The first was to rewrite a text that had a load of errors in it. For example, it said the aim of the course was to see how Portuguese identity had changed and the role of literature on this process, which true to a certain extent, but that’s not the stated objective of the course. Then it said that there were four key figures of the course. I rather snippily added a parenthesis saying it was three individuals and a couple. I suppose arguably two couples but the Marquês of Chamilly has no rights. We do not stan. The four, it claimed, reinforced traditional stereotypes (yeah, sure, Brites de Almeida is a typical girly girl). It described Teorema by Herberto Hélder but made some straightforward mistakes – the identity of the protagonist, his first name, and the centuries in which the story takes place. The story is so good that I was able to spot the mistakes pretty well, except that the text said it took place in Santarém and I honestly have no idea where it’s meant to have happened, so although I thought it was probably wrong, I left it as it was.
The second question just asked in what way this statue represents Dom João II. I had included it in my revision first thing this morning, so I had all the vocabulary to hand.
Where might I have gone wrong?
Well, first of all, the setup of the question seems to imply that there are certain indisputible mistakes in the first text. I thought some of them were a bit debatable and probably waffled on a bit, explaining to what extent I thought the statements were false and why. But I still finished early, so… Well, i surely wasn’t supposed to do less was I?
And secondly, in expressing my fascination with the story of the Portuguese letters, I came down pretty unambiguously on the side of the non-marianistas. The question didn’t really ask for a discussion of the pros and cons of this point of view so I thought I was pretty safe there but I’ve probably expressed it too strongly. I say she was the victim of a lie (because tbe letters were probably fake) but now I think of it again, I wonder if it comes across as me saying the romance itself didn’t happen. That was probably clumsy.
On the whole, I really enjoyed this challenge. It was nice to write a piece of graded work in an exam setting where the aim was to communicate, and to make a particular case, and not to be grammatically correct. I checked the grammar, of course, but the grammar wasn’t the point, as it would have been in a CAPLE exam.
Luso 