CHAPTER II THEORETICAL REVIEW AND CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK
A. Theoretical Review 1 Writing
a The Nature of English Writing
Writing is one of the important skills that is taught in language learning for senior high school. The definitions of writing are variously stated by some
experts. According to Brown 2001:336, writing can be defined as a thinking process which means that in composing writing work, the work can be planned
and given with an unlimited number of revisions before its release. In line with Brown, Harmer 2007:3 defines that spoken language is acquired naturally as a
result of being exposed to it, whereas the ability to write has to be conciously learned. Therefore, the students cannot be mastered in writing by themselves but
they have to learn how to write step by step. In composing a good writing, a writer has to convey the meaning in
written language by giving some explanations that have to be understood by the readers. Therefore, creating an understandable writing work is the purpose of
learning writing skills. In order to make a good writing work, Mc Carthy 2000:25-26 explains two important aspects of creating a good piece of writing
namely cohesion and coherence. Cohesion can be defined as the surface links between clauses and sentences of a text, while coherence is the feeling that the
elements of a text are bound together. Those aspects determine the quality of a written product.
Writing skill is one of the most difficult skills that is taught in English learning especially for non-English speaking students, because writing can not be
mastered naturally instead of taking some learning writing steps to be an expert writer based on Richards and Renandya 2002:303 who state that writing is the
most difficult skill to be mastered by foreign students. Furthermore, Grenville 2001:iv adds that writing becomes hard when the students should think about
grabbing the first interesting sentence, blank about what to write, and realize that writing is to find interesting stuff to write. As a result, there are some problems of
learning writing for the foreign students such as the students are lack of developing ideas and they do not know how to attract the reader by creating an
interesting sentence in foreign language. In improving the writing skill, the students cannot be composing a good
writing product because in learning the writing skill, there are some steps that should be done. Harmer 2007:326 states that the writing processes are divided
into three steps namely planning, drafting and editing. Based on theory the students use the characteristics of written language and the aspects of writing to
help the students in composing a writing product easily. According to Brown,1994 in Weigle:2002 the characteristics of written language are divided
into seven points.