The Meaning of Writing

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CHAPTER II REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE

A. Theoretical Description 1. Writing Competence

a. The Meaning of Writing

Learning language means learning to communicate with each other, to interact with them, to understand them, to talk them, to read what they have written, to write to them. One way to create communication is through writing. In writing, the writers are able to express ideas and feelings to persuade and convince other people White and Arndt, 1997: 1. According to Widdowson 1996: 62, writing is described as the use of the medium to manifest in the graphology and grammatical system of the language. That is to say, writing in one sense is the productions of sentences as instances of usage. But of course, writing is not just a production of a sequence of English sentences. The sentences can be used to create a discourse and each sentence takes on a particular value as a part of this discourse. In this case, writing can be said as the act of making up correct sentences and transmitting them through the visual medium as marks on paper. White and Arndt 1997: 3 express their assumption about writing. Writing is far from being a simple matter of transcribing language into written symbols: it is a thinking process in its own right. It demands conscious intellectual effort, which usually has to be sustained over a considerable period of time. They also say that commit to users writing is a form of problem solving which covers such processes as generating ideas, planning, goal setting, monitoring, and evaluating that is going to be written as well as what has been written, and finding the suitable expression with which to express exact meaning. In other words, writing is a thinking process which involves some processes and considerable period of time to express the writers’ exact meaning. As stated by Langan 2001: 12 that writing is a process of continuing discovery that involves series of steps, not an automatic process. Bell and Burnaby in Nunan 1998: 36 point out that writing is a complex cognitive activity in which the writer is demanded to demonstrate control of a number of variables simultaneously at the sentence level – include control of content, spelling, and letter formation – and beyond the sentence – structure and integrate information into cohesive and coherent paragraph and text. In addition, Haldfield 2004: v says that there is cognitive difficulty in which that the students have to organize their thought on paper. That is why writing is regarded as the most difficult language skill to learn for a language learner. In this study, writing can be defined as a means of communication for expressing ideas, feelings, and thought in written form through the writing process and period of time by considering the written convention.

b. Micro and Macro Skills in Writing