The Hypercorrection in Enem essays on the Uol Education website

Abstract

The difficulty of achieving the linguistic norm and the degree of formality required by writing evaluations, as practiced by Enem, reveals the linguistic insecurity of many Brazilian students. Such insecurity materializes in the productions by means of expedients such as the exaggerated application of rules - hypercorrection. In this sense, the aim of this paper was to analyze and describe the hypercorrected uses in Enem essays produced by exam candidates and corrected by professionals from the website UOL Educação. To do so, we analyzed 80 essays from the site, cataloged the hypercorrected usages identified, highlighting the type and the (non)correction by the professional, and, finally, we described each case based on the consulted bibliography, observing the catalysts that influence them - the force of normative prescriptions and the insufficient domain, by the writers, of the rules and conventions that govern formal written Portuguese. In the corpus analyzed, we identified 53 occurrences of hypercorrection, grouped into 10 different cases, 18 of which were uncorrected. Given these results, we found that hypercorrection is a recurring phenomenon in texts by student candidates for the exam and that, although negatively evaluated by language professionals, it represents a latent issue in the teaching of Portuguese.

KEYWORDS: Portuguese teaching; Essay Enem; Hypercorrection.