Significance of the Study

11 represented by some signs such as letters and punctuation. These letters are combined into words, words into sentences, and sentences into paragraphs. In order to be able to write, people should think about what messages that they want to express and to whom their messages are being communicated to. The nature of writing is defined as both physical and mental activity that is aimed to express and impress Nunan, 2003:88. It is categorized as a physical act because a writer is required to be able to do the act of committing words or ideas. As a mental work, the activities of writing focus more on the act of inventing ideas, thinking about how to express and organize them into clear statements and paragraphs that enable a reader to understand the ideas of the written work. In addition, Hamp-Lyons and Kroll in Weigle 2002:19 define writing as an act that takes place within a context, that accomplishes a certain purpose, and appropriately shaped for its intended readers. Furthermore, Palmer et al. 1994: 5 states that writing is a kind of thinking activity through written words. It requires complex thinking which is involved problem solving and decision making. It means that a good writing needs a careful thinking that can be represented in the form of generating the idea, choosing the suitable words or appropriate vocabulary, and arranging those ideas into a good sequence. In some ways, written language is different from spoken language. It makes writing as the product of written language has some characteristics. 12 According to Brown 2001:341 there are seven characteristics of written language. They are: 1 Permanence: once something is written down and delivered in its final form its intended audience, the writer gives up a certain power; the power to emend, to clarify, and to withdraw. 2 Production time: writer is given appropriate stretches time for developing efficient processes for achieving the final product. 3 Distance: concern with the audience, the writer must anticipate how specific words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs will be interpreted. A good writer can read their own writing from the perspective of the mind of the targeted audience. 4 Orthography: the ideas are captured through the manipulation of a few dozen letters and other written symbols. 5 Complexity: writer must learn how to remove redundancy, how to combine sentences, how to make references, how to create syntactic and lexical variety, and much more. 6 Vocabulary: written language places a heavier demand on vocabulary use than does speaking. 7 Formality: the most difficult and complex conventions occur in academic writing where students have to learn how to describe, explain, compare, contrast, illustrate, defend, criticize, and argue. In conclusion, there are many views about how to define the nature of writing. Overall, those views explain that writing as a product of written language has some characteristics that differentiate written language from the spoken one. Moreover, writing is an act that not only involves deep thinking in arranging the ideas and converting them into some words and sentences, but also making them suitable with the context, purpose, and audience.

b. The Process of Writing

According to Hedge in McDonough and Shaw 2003:163, the writing process is represented by the stages below: 13 Getting ideas together  planning and outlining  making notes  making a first draft  revising and redrafting  editing final revision Byrne in McDonough and Shaw 2003:163 also mentions that the writing process included: listing ideas, making an outline, writing a draft, correcting and improving the draft, and writing the final version. Furthermore, Richards and Renandya 2002: 316 state that process writing as a classroom activity incorporates the four basic writing stages; planning, drafting writing, revising redrafting and editing. For each stage, various learning activities that can support the learning of specific writing skills are suggested. For instance, in the planning stage, teachers can help their students to improve their writing skills in generating ideas by giving activities, such as brainstorming, clustering, rapid free writing, giving motivational quote and playing music. The planned writing experiences for the students can be described as follows: 1 Planning Planning or pre-writing is an activity of writing that is aimed to encourage and stimulate the students to write. This is the stage where a writer builds a foundation of what heshe will write. Since its function is to stimulate students’ ideas to write, the writing activities must be prepared to provide them learning experiences of writing, for example brainstorming clustering, rapid free writing, giving motivational quote and playing music.