New grammar consolidates the bases of a Brazilian standard norm – 10/25/2023 – Sérgio Rodrigues

The topic of writing has dominated the column in recent weeks, but the conversation has been concentrated among those who already know it, a very small minority of the Brazilian population. Time to take a few steps back.

Long before facing advanced writing issues, the person must actually learn to write – and in this the Brazilian education system has failed the majority.

We have reached a desolate situation in which multitudes are thrown into the job market with their higher education diplomas without having mastered formal writing skills that should have been guaranteed since elementary school.

In the rush – more than understandable, obligatory – to make up for lost time in decades of exclusion and normalization of illiteracy, Brazil seems to have agreed to expand literacy at any cost.

If that’s the idea, it’s working. From double digits at the beginning of the century, the number of illiterates in the country fell to 5.6% last year, according to IBGE. Very good.

However, as the Functional Literacy Indicator (Inaf) reports, between 2001 and 2018 the share of Brazilians who are proficient in reading and writing remained stubbornly constant – around 12%.

This is reminiscent of a quote by João Ubaldo Ribeiro, many years ago: “We talk all the time about digital exclusion, this calamity that afflicts us. Let’s fight it, yes. But let’s make sure that, when we use the computer , the newly included know the letters on the keyboard”.

A book has just come out that shines a light in this pitch black: “Grammatics of Written Brazilian Portuguese” (Parabola), by linguists Francisco Eduardo Vieira and Carlos Alberto Faraco. The book is great news for several reasons, among which I highlight two.

The first is its sober consolidation of the bases of a Brazilian standard norm, free from the lame rules (with a welcome double meaning) of Portuguese grammarians – whose job is to standardize a language different from ours, called European Portuguese.

Two hundred years after Independence and one hundred years after Mário de Andrade proclaimed that, in the language, “Brazilians have the right to be”, the conservatism of recognizing the importance of the standard norm finally marries the revolutionary spirit of demanding that it be our.

The second reason why Vieira and Faraco’s grammar shines is the fact that it takes up with great emphasis a dimension of language teaching that has been neglected and sometimes even denied in recent times: syntactic analysis.

The importance of developing syntactic awareness – having an “effective understanding of the structural possibilities of the sentence” – assumes in the book the role that I have always believed it plays in teaching writing.

I never forgot the day that this tough, hitherto impenetrable school subject opened up to me as if by magic – or like the machine of the world opening up to Drummond.

I was 12 years old and, at that moment, writing became what it is for me to this day, a pleasurable game of taking apart and reassembling sentences.

Fortunately, the syntactic analysis models used by Vieira and Faraco are much better – simpler and more functional – than the ones from my childhood.

In the name of transparency, it remains to be said that the authors invited me to write a short introductory text for this edition, which I did with great pride. Believe me, this in no way diminishes the importance of the work.

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