The Micro- and Macro- Skills of Writing

2 Drafting After the writers find the ideas, they draft their thought. It can be a guideline to write the writing product. A draft can refer to the first version of a piece of writing. 3 Editing reflecting and revising After making a draft, the writers read what they have written to see what they have done. They can check whether the order of the information is clear or not. Whether the way something written is ambiguous or confusing. 4 Final version After the writers have edited their draft and revised the parts they consider to change, they produce the final version. The final version can be different from the first draft but the writer is now ready to send or publish the writing product to the audience. Writing is a long process. The stages above show that writing is not easy for students so they need more efforts in each stage in the process of writing. In addition, Brown 2001: 348 describes that there are three stages of writing process. Those are pre-writing, drafting and revising. The pre-writing is aimed to generate ideas, which can happen in numerous ways. They are reading extensively a passage, skimming or scanning a passage, conducting some outside research, brainstorming, listing, clustering, discussing a topic or question, instructor initiated questions, and free writing. Then, the drafting and revising stages are the core processes of writing in traditional approaches to writing instruction. 2. Teaching Writing Brown 2007: 8 defines teaching as showing or helping someone to learn how to do something, give instructions, guide in the study of something, provide with knowledge, and cause to know or understand. Moreover, he also says that teaching is guiding and facilitating learning, enabling the learner to learn, and setting the conditions for learning. In teaching writing especially, the teacher should guide students in order that the students have good skills in writing many kinds of texts that should be taught based on the students’ grade. Writing is not an easy job for the students. Richards and Renandya 2002: 303 say that it is because the skills involved in writing are highly complex. It deals with punctuation, spelling, word choice, and so on. To make students be able in writing, teachers transfer their knowledge by teaching. Harmer 2004: 41 explains that there must be five steps at least in teaching writing. They are demonstrating, motivating and provoking, supporting, responding, and evaluating. To be competent in teaching writing, teachers should know some principles in teaching writing. Brown 2001: 346-356 states that there are ten basic principles for designing writing techniques. They are stated below. 1 Incorporating practices of “good” writer, 2 balancing process and product, 3 accounting for cultural or literary backgrounds, 4 connecting reading and writing, 5 providing as much authentic writing as possible, 6 framing the techniques in terms of prewriting, 7 drafting and revising stages, 8 striving to offer techniques that are as interactive as possible, 9 applying methods of responding to and correcting the students’ writing sensitively, and 10 instructing students on the rhetorical, formal conventions of writing. 3. Teaching Writing in Junior High School a. Aims and Objectives of Teaching English The aim to teach English in Junior High School is to make the students able to solve problem of the spoken and written language. Standard of Competency and Basic Competency of Curriculum stated that the capability to communicate is the capability to produce oral and written text in four skills. School-Based Curriculum, 2006. According to Depdiknas 2006, there are several purposes of learning English at Junior high school. They are developing the communication competence in the form of oral and written texts to achieve the functional literacy level, having senses about the importance of English to increase the nation competitive ability in the goal society, and developing the students’ understanding about the relationship between language are culture. In addition, English subject is important because it is one of the compulsory subjects that have to be taught for students of Junior High School. English is also one of the subjects that is being examined in the National Examination. That is why, teaching writing as one of English skills is important.