The Stages in Writing Process

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d. The Stages in Writing Process

The ability to write articulately gives one the power and opportunity to share and influence thoughts, ideas, and opinions with others, not only in day-to- day situations, but across time and space. Writing is also one of the most difficult skills to master in both of the first language and the second language. It causes everybody writes a little differently from everybody else. Therefore, in writing process students need some stages to produce a piece of writing well. According to Research and Evaluation Report in Graves, et al 2007 writing process consists of 1 Pre-writing, 2 Drafting and Writing, 3 Sharing and responding, 4 Revising and Editing, 5 Publishing. 1 Pre-writing Widodo 2008 states this stage is geared to stimulate ideas or thoughts for the students to get started. Pre-writing also assists student writers in deciding what to write about so that they can organize their thoughts. Therefore, in this stage has the purpose to help the student in organizing their ideas and to make a planning of what they are going to writer. They are able to explore certain topics in an unstructured and non-threatening way before working on formal essays. For novice student writers, pre-writing is thought of as a prerequisite for producing good essays. 2 Drafting and Writing In this phase, the students are encouraged to develop their ideas into rough drafts without considering the grammatical accuracy first. As previously described, in the process based writing, the grammatical accuracy will be commit to user 20 emphasized during the revising stage Widodo, 2008. It means that students are not supposed to make rough drafts perfect in grammatical accuracy in that this process of writing class is a continuous process of discovery. The important thing is they are able to promote the fluency of ideas so that a certain writing task can smoothly be completed. 3 Sharing and responding Sharing means just what it says: sharing your work with other people and getting some feedback about how you are doing Peha, 2002: 10 . Meanwhile, Widodo 2008 states that r esponding or giving feedback is primarily intended to see students first or second drafts. In this phase, teacher will help the students in responding the result of making the drafts. They are required to be active in participating in the classroom, when they give the responds to other students. In other words, in this phase, the students will get the feedback from other students and they will be involved to think creatively in which the goal is to encourage the students to write better. 4 Revising and Editing According to Widodo 2008 revising does not simply involve looking at language errors but also addresses the global content and organization of ideas so that the writer‟s intent is made clearer to the reader. The students will revise their work based on the feedback given in the responding stage from the other students. In the stage, they have discussed and evaluated some mistakes of the drafts. Moreover, in revising stage involves four distinctly different things that students often have to do all at the same time: a Adding things; b Moving commit to user 21 things; c Cutting things; and d Leaving things alone. Furthermore, editing means taking care of any problems that students get involve in writing conventions like spelling, punctuation, grammar, and usage. Editing is hard because there a lot of things that they need to know in order to do it well, such as: to edit for spelling they have to know many words and be able to use a dictionary, and to edit for punctuation they have to understand of how to use every type of punctuation your writing needs. 5 Publishing Publishing is all about: preparing a piece of writing so that it can be read, understood, and enjoyed by the public Peha, 2002: 19 . The main idea is that the publishing stage is the chance of the students to prepare their writing in a way that will best reach of their audience. Publishing can be a very satisfying part of writing. In this stage, students are able to publish their result of writing in media online or notice boards. It means that it can be reward for students that they have done their writing well and it can encourage them to write better. From the definition above, it can be assumed that writing process is one of effective ways to teach the students. Although, there are many stages in writing, the students may use different stages to express their ideas. The stages will help the students to be easier in producing the written text. Referring the stages, the students are required to evaluate their strengths and weaknesses of their writing ability and to think of how they will make further improvements for their writing skill. It is also important to ensure the students become confident and independent in writing process. commit to user 22

e. Writing Assessment