13 and action of the students. Therefore, the
students‟ responses to the use of mind mapping can determine the effectiveness of mind mapping.
2. Writing Skill
a. Definition of writing
In this research, the researcher only focused on writing skill. Furthermore, there are some definitions of writing stated by some experts. Writing can be
defined as a series of contrast Nunan, 2003. At first, writing is both a physical and a mental act. At the most basic level, writing is the physical act of committing
words or ideas to some medias. On the other hand, writing is the mental work of investing ideas, thinking about how to express them, and organizing them into
statements and paragraphs that will be clear to a reader. Zamel 1982 states that writing is the process of discovering meaning and it is producing something in
written form so that people can read and perform it or use it. Moreover, writing is a way of sharing personal meanings and writing course emphasizes the power of
the individual to construct his or her own views on a topic Hyland, 2003. It means that something which is provided in written form will be used by the
people to discover the meaning of the writing. Writing is a complex process that allows writers to explore thoughts and
ideas, and make them visible and concrete Gaith, 2002. There are five basic steps of writing, namely pre-writing, writing, revision, editing and publishing
Gerson, 2013. Pre-writing consists of finding the ideas, building the ideas, planning and structuring the paragraph. Some of the students found the difficulties
in doing the pre-writing steps. Harmer 2000 explains about students‟ difficulties
14 in doing the pre-writing steps that some of the students are extremely unconfident
and unenthusiastic writers. One of the reasons is because they think that they do not have anything to say and cannot come up with the ideas. It was linear to the
situation that the students of SMP Negeri 15 faced. They could not find the right ideas and organize their ideas into the structural paragraph.
It can be concluded that writing is a process of organizing ideas in which the writer is demanded to perform creativity in using the language skills to
produce a written text. The writer should have a good skill to organize their ideas which can help them to make the best written product. It can also help the reader
to understand the meaning easily.
b. Aspects of Writing Skill
