Proofreading a Host-Institution Email
A university applicant in Ireland has drafted an email in Portuguese to the international office of a Portuguese university. The deadline for a scholarship is 15 March, and the missing document is a certificate of completion. The draft is 120 words long and will be sent to a generic office address, so the recipient's gender and name are unknown. The draft contains the following sentences: 'Exmo. Senhor, Venho por este meio solicitar-lhe o envio do meu certificado de conclusão, que ainda não recebi. Desde que cheguei em Portugal, em setembro, tenho tentado contactar o vosso serviço, mas ninguém me respondeu. Fazem dois meses que espero por uma resposta. É possível que o meu pedido ficou retido no sistema. Gostaria que me informassem se há algum documento em falta, e se for necessário, posso enviar de novo. Aguardo a vossa resposta com urgência, porque preciso do documento para concorrer a uma bolsa até 15 de março.' You are asked to proofread the draft for European Portuguese, not Brazilian Portuguese, and to keep it formal without making it archaic. You may change punctuation and wording, but you must not add new facts.
1. Identify the three constructions that a European Portuguese examiner would mark as non-standard and correct them. For each, name the rule in one line.
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'cheguei em Portugal' → 'cheguei a Portugal'. 'Chegar' is a motion verb whose complement is introduced by 'a' in standard EP; 'em' is heard in casual speech and is more tolerated with 'estar', not with 'chegar' in a formal letter.
'Fazem dois meses que espero' → 'Faz dois meses que espero'. When 'fazer' indicates elapsed time, it is impersonal and stays in the third-person singular; it does not agree with 'dois meses'.
'É possível que o meu pedido ficou retido' → 'É possível que o meu pedido tenha ficado retido'. The impersonal expression 'é possível que' opens a subjunctive clause; because the retention is past relative to now, use the present perfect subjunctive 'tenha ficado', not the indicative preterite.
A fourth possible edit is 'se for necessário' → 'se necessário', but that is concision, not an error. Do not present it as a grammar mistake.
2. The student wants to keep 'Exmo. Senhor' and 'Venho por este meio'. Advise on both, given the recipient is a generic office with unknown gender.
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Keep 'Venho por este meio' if the rest is formal. It is formulaic but still current in institutional email, and it does not add a fact. Replace 'Exmo. Senhor' because the gender is unknown and the addressee is an office, not a named person.
Safer openings are 'Exmos. Senhores,' 'À Direção do Serviço de Relações Internacionais,' or 'Estimados Senhores,'. 'Exmo. Senhor' is not grammatically wrong, but it creates a mismatch: a singular male title to an unknown recipient. In EP, 'Exmo.' is a high formal title; overusing it with an unknown addressee can look like a mail-merge error. Keep 'Com os melhores cumprimentos' as the close; it is standard and not archaic. Do not switch to 'Atenciosamente', which is more Brazilian in this context.
3. A classmate says 'É possível que ficou' is fine because you hear it in Portugal. How should the candidate decide what to submit?
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Distinguish description from prescription. In informal EP, the indicative after 'é possível que' occurs, and you may hear it; but an exam or a formal letter is a prescriptive context. The standard rule is subjunctive after evaluative or impersonal expressions of possibility. The candidate should submit 'tenha ficado'.
The same logic applies to 'acho que' (indicative) versus 'é possível que' (subjunctive): the trigger is the expression, not the speaker's intention. If the candidate wants to avoid the construction, rewrite: 'Suponho que o pedido ficou retido' - but that changes the meaning slightly from possibility to supposition and adds a claim. Best answer: use the subjunctive and, if challenged, cite the trigger.