Considering that some institutions, as the Universidade Federal de Campina Grande (UFCG), are now asking in the composition test that the candidates write a specific textual genre - and not, as before, a free style composition - in most of the exams to attend the university, the present paper aims at (1) assessing the required lettering practices in the production of a protest letter, as asked in the exam for the UFCG in 2007, and (2) investigate the correlation between the practices shown by the candidates in the production of the letter, and his/her lettering background. For such a goal, a descriptive-interpretive research was carried out, whose corpus was constituted by the test applied in the referred exam, as well as by a sample of the letters produced by the candidates, in addition to interviews with those candidates. The data were analyzed based on the studies on critical lettering (BATON; HAMILTON, 2000; GEE, 2000), and suggest that the lettering history of the candidates constitutes a decisive factor for the mobilization of lettered practices in compositions.
Protest Letter; Lettered Practices; Literacy History