This pilot study examines the face work in two students' e-mail requests for letters of recommendation, to investigate whether and how the type and amount of face work differs in requests written in English and Spanish by native speakers of each language. The results do not conform to those of previous comparisons of requestive behavior between the two languages, which predict more direct strategies in Spanish. This may be due to the fact that previous studies have relied largely on elicited data. The present paper points to the need to conduct a larger scale study using natural data, in order to find out what factors will hold across a more sizeable corpus, and to highlight the complexity of individual differences. (Contains 10 notes, 2 figures and 5 tables.)