CHEPTER II REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE AND RESEARCH
B. Theoretical Bases
2. The Nature of Writing
Harmer stated that writing is a way to produce language and express ideas, feelings, and opinions24. Meanwhile, Meyers stated that writing is a method in order to produce language that the writers do naturally when they speak25. In simple words, writing is spoken activity on paper or on computer screen.
To summarize the experts’ views above, it can be concluded that writing is a complex activity of converting oral to
24 Jeremy Harmer, How to Teach Writing, (England: Pearson Education Limited, 2004), p. 67.
25 Alan Meyers., Gateway to Academic Writing, (White Plans, NY: Longman, 2005), p.
102.
written language by considering the grammatical correctness to communicate the message or the writer’s intentions.
Writing was considered as a difficult skill in the school among four English language skills. To students, it was quite difficult to produce a text by using English correctly according to the grammatical system. Moreover, the students have to write the ideas inside their mind and write it on a paper in right procedure by following the writing aspects, in this case, says in descriptive text.
Writing also needs a quite long-term time to be developed. It cannot be achieved in one time learning only.
b. Aspects of Writing
There are several aspects which should be considered by the students in order to write well. First, according to Harris, there are five aspects in writing, those are; grammar, form, vocabulary, mechanic, and style. The following aspects can be explained as follows26:
1) Grammar
Grammar is the implementation of grammatical form and syntactic pattern.
2) Form (organization)
Form means the organization of the content. We should clarify our idea and make it clear with good sequences.
26 Jeremy Harris, Introducing Writing, (US: Penguin English, 1993), p. 246.
3) Vocabulary
Vocabulary refers to the selection of words which are suitable with the content.
4) Mechanic
Mechanic refers to the use of conventional graphic of the language, for example, the step of arranging letters, words, and paragraphs.
5) Style
Style means the choice of structure and lexical items to give a particular tone to the writing.
However, according to Byrne in Rusmawan , there are five components that should be considered in writing27:
1) Organizing idea
Ideas are the most important issue in writing. A writer wouldn’t be able to write meaningfully if he/she don’t have any idea in mind.
2) Grammar
A way that the language behaves was determined by the grammar.
27 Putu Ngurah Rusmawan, “Teaching Writing Descriptive Text Activities In Islamic Boarding School” Al-Ma’rifat Journal, Vol. 3, No. 1, April 2018.
3) Vocabulary
Vocabulary is important in writing because by having much vocabulary, a writer can express more about what he/her writes clearly.
4) Mechanics 1. Punctuation 2. Capitalization 3. Spelling 5) Content
Content is how the writer develop the idea related with the topic.
c. Process of Writing
Brown stated that a written form is the result of thinking, drafting, and revising a procedure that requires particularized skills which not every speaker does naturally28. It means that writing is not a simple task, needs the process of building the idea and constructing a text. The process of writing falls into some steps.
Harmer stated that there are four stages in writing process.
Those are planning, drafting, editing, and final version29.
28 H Douglas Brown, Principle of Language Learning and Teaching Fifth Edition, (US:
Pearson Education , 2007), p. 104.
29 Jeremy Harmer, How to Teach Writing, (England: Pearson Education Limited, 2004), p. 5.
1) Planning
In planning, there are three main topics which students have to do in this stage. First, the students should decide the purpose in their writing activity. Second, the students should think the style how they are going to deliver the message/idea. In other words, they should think about the language style. The last is students must think about the content structure in order to know the best sequence for the facts, ideas, and arguments that they are going to include.
2) Drafting
Drafting is the first version of a piece of paper. In this stage, the writer/student needs quite long time to focus in developing and organizing the ideas.
3) Editing
Once the writer/student writes the draft, they should read it again to find out whether there are mistakes or not which is known as reflecting activity. After knowing the mistakes, the writer can revise it in order to have a good quality of their written text.
4) Final version
After the editing process, the writer/student creates the final version. It might be different from what the writer/student have planned and drafted before since in
editing there are many changes happens. However, after having the final version the writer/student can send their written text to the reader or to the teacher. This is the last stage in writing process.
Figure 2.2 Writing process
Whereas according to Zemach and Rumisek, a good writer should go through these several steps to produce writing, those are30:
1) Pre-writing
Pre-writing is first step of writing process. The writers try to find what she/he wants to write in this step. Prewriting stage involves choosing a topic, gathering ideas about the topic, and organizing the ideas.
2) Drafting
In this stage, the writer will convert the ideas into words on a computer or paper based on the topic. At the
30 Dorothy E Zemach, Lisa A Rumisek, Academic Writing from Paragraph to Essay, (US: Macmillan Education, 2005), p. 5.
drafting stage, the writer will focus on the fluency of writing in term of the organization and language.
3) Reviewing and Revising
Reviewing stage is checking what the writer had written, from the structure to the content. The writer can ask to classmates to exchange texts. Readers’ opinion is a good way to know if the writing is clear and effective.
4) Rewriting
Rewriting also known as editing process. This stage occurs after revising. The aim of this stage is to give the writer an opportunity to fix his/her in order to make it better. The students can ask to teacher to give opinions about the writing. The teacher helps the students through the revision to shape and reshape the writing into final form, and it is focused more on organization, content of writing, and sentence structures. The students check their final text for some mistakes they have made.
From the explanation above, it can be concluded that in writing there are four steps; planning or pre-writing (deciding the topic), drafting (writing keywords), editing or reviewing and revising (checking the composition), rewriting or final version (revising the composition until become a good composition).
d. Types of Writing
Writing skill is categorized into different purposes and types as Brown described that there are four types of writing skill area, those are31:
1) Imitative Writing
The category includes the ability to spell correctly.
This level is usually for Elementary School Students.
2) Intensive (Controlled) Writing
This category is applied for Junior High School where most of the assessment tasks are more concerned on writing form and are rather strictly controlled by the test design.
3) Responsive Writing
This level usually intended for Senior High School level which demands the students to perform a limited discourse level and creating logically connected sequence of two or three paragraphs.
4) Extensive Writing
This level is usually for advanced learners which insist successful management of all the processes and strategies of writing for all purposes, such an essay, a term paper, a thesis, etc.
31 H Douglas Brown, Teaching by Principle an Interactive Way to Approach Language Pedagogy Second Edition, (US: Pearson Education , 2007), p. 343.
3. The Nature of Descriptive text