Linguistic properties of Enem essays

a computational analysis

Abstract

This paper aims to describe some linguistic properties found in Enem essays graded to 1000 points, the maximal score. It considers that this genre has its own characteristics, such as the relation between exposition and argumentative types, a wide repertoire, as well as a large use of connectives and modal elements, all of them contribute to characterize this genre. In this research, by considering the strict evaluation process, it has been considered that these essays graded to 1000 points prototypically represent the genre, once that they meet the criteria required by the evaluation panel. The corpus consists of 95 essays that got 1000 points in 2014, 2018 and 2019 exams. It has been analyzed by means of Tropes, a computational tool that verifies the frequency of lexical items group them in categories and repertoire. The results show that such essays follow what the literature proposed by the genre, especially, the impersonality (third person only), the vast repertoire extension (universe of reference), the range of connectives and modal elements, besides the recurrence of stative verbs, such as ser (‘to be’). Consequently, one concludes that both the tool contributes to the genre description, and the results put forward the debate around the standardization of the Enem essay structure.