Nas margens da escrita académica

Two case studies on academic writing aim at characterizing the writing profiles of students entering higher education through means other than the National Access Competition. The first case is the written task of an exam for students of professional and artistic courses applying for polytechnic institutes. The second one consists of the written diagnostic of a Workshop on Portuguese for Academic Purposes. Considering the Development Response as the aggregating textual genre, texts of the order of argument and explanation/exposition were analyzed. The study revealed globally higher results in case 1 (entrance test), difficulties across the whole set of texts, and specific problems in the group of students speaking varieties of Portuguese different from EP. Cross-cutting weaknesses were identified at the macrostructure level, such as the inclusion of counter-arguments and the elaboration of an adequate conclusion, as well as at the microstructure level, such as punctuation due to syntactic knowledge and limited use of contrastive and causal connectors. This characterization of students writing profiles at the entrance to higher education allows the development of intentional interventions in the writing practices of different scientific areas.