The Definition of Writing

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CHAPTER II LITERATURE REVIEW

A. Writing

1. The Definition of Writing

Writing is a skill which stimulates students’ mind to think actively because they have to be a hard thinker to connect between fact and ideas. Rise B. Axelrod and Charles R. Chooper stated, writing makes writers becoming an active learner because they have to record, clarify, and organize their thoughts and experiences. 1 Writers have to connect between information and ideas into a written form and effort to understand about and communicate them to the readers. Writing is done simultaneously so it leads students to think critically because in their mind they have already been thinking about what they want to say and how to say it into the written form. 2 Therefore, writing will indirectly enables students to do more than one action in one activity. Students have determined what is in their mind which leads them to write something and they should not merely know the ideas that come into their mind but also the ways to deliver them into the words. Writers are trying to discover something new to write or a new way how to express their ideas when they strive to write down or what they will write down on a paper. Since the writers are striving to find the right words and sentences, it makes them to build a relationship between writing correctly and thinking hard to write a readable text entirely. “Writing is a tool for discovery. Writing generates new ideas by helping us to make a connection and see relationships. 3 ” The writers can build up a relation to the readers through writing by delivering a message into a written form which comes from ideas during the writing process, so the writers 1 Rise B. Axelrod and Charles R. Chooper, The ST. Martine’s Guide to Writing, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1986, p. 2. 2 Alice Oshima and Ann Hogue, Introduction to Academic Writing, third edition, New York: Pearson Education, Inc., 2007, p. 15. 3 Maxine Hairstone, Contemporary Composition, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1986, p. 2. try to engage to the readers. To produce a well written, students have to generate ideas to make the written itself has the very coherent, fluent, and clear construction and a message can be delivered to the readers. Writing skill is considered as the complex skill because students have to master not only the component of grammatical and structure of the sentence but also the structures of the paragraph itself, furthermore, students’ effort are required to generate their ideas that come along into the words. 4 It is one of the reasons that makes students are sometimes reluctantly writing any kind of text. Finally, students think that a writing activity as the frightening assignment and they are afraid of their teachers who command them to write something neither as the assignment in the class nor as homework. Indeed, students have to strive composing a readable text and free of grammatical mistakes in order to make their writing is understandable. 5 Actually, it is a double task for students of English as a Foreign Language because they do not merely compose a free of grammatical mistakes written but also they have to write a text into English which is fully comprehended by the readers. To make the written is free of grammatical mistakes; writers should have the competency of vocabulary, idioms, sentence structure, word choice, and so forth and it has to be practiced everyday because it is not the once-a week activity. As the result, writing has a positive effect on the teaching and on the attitude of both teachers and students. 6 Thus, writing requires the combination of student’s abilities, not only the written structure in a word, sentence till paragraph but also they have to think harder to deliver what is in their mind to construct the overall written. It is not easy to construct a readable text; students need practice to write continuously. 4 J. B. Heaton, Writing English Language Tests, New York: Longman Inc., 1988, p. 135. 5 Audrey L. Reynolds, Exploring Written English, A Guide for Basic Writers, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1983, p. 3. 6 Emi Emilia, Teaching Writing: Developing Critical Learners, Bandung: Rizqi Press, 2010, p. 164.

2. The Purposes of Writing