Writing Skill REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE

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2.2 Writing Skill

Meyers 2005:2 states that writing is also an action- a process of discovering and organizing your ideas, putting them on a paper, and reshaping and revising them. It means that the writers need to be creative in generating and organizing their ideas into meaningful written texts. In organizing ideas, there are four main areas of varied skills which are necessary for writing: 1 Grammatical skills: the ability to write correct sentences. 2 Stylistics skills: the ability to manipulate sentences and use language effectively. 3 Mechanical skills: the ability to use correctly those conventions peculiar to written language- e.g. punctuation, spelling. 4 Judgment skills: the ability to write in an appropriate manner for a particular purpose with a particular audience in mind, together with an ability to select, organize, and order relevant information Heaton 1974:138. Moreover, Brown 2004:221 suggests micro skills and macro skills for the successful mastery of writing. Micro skills include: 1 Producing graphemes and orthographic patterns of English. 2 Producing writing at an efficient rate of speed to suit the purpose. 3 Procuring an acceptable core of words and use of appropriate word order patterns. 12 4 Using acceptable grammatical systems e.g. tense, agreement, and pluralization, patterns, and rules. 5 Expressing a particular meaning in different grammatical forms. 6 Using cohesive devices in written discourse. Macro skills include: 1 Using the rhetorical forms and conventions of written discourse. 2 Appropriately accomplishing the communicative functions of written texts according to form and purpose. 3 Conveying links and connections between events and such communicative relations as main ideas, supporting ideas, new information, generalization, and exemplification. 4 Distinguishing between literal and implied meanings when writing 5 Correctly conveying culturally specific references in the context of the written text. 6 Developing and using a battery of writing strategies such as accurately assessing the audience’s interpretation, using prewriting devices, writing with influence in the first drafts, using paraphrases and synonyms, soliciting peer and instructor feedback, and using feedback for revising and editing. From the statements above, I conclude that writing is a way to produce language including organizing ideas with the correct grammar, structure, and appropriate manner to reach the writing’s purposes. 13

2.3 Technique in Teaching Writing