Sylma Fathmalani

Sylma Fathmalani

Class : 3C

NPM : 10211210328

HOW TO IMPROVE WRITING ABILITY

Abstract

      The school started to teach their students not only English for specific purpose but also general English. Graduating from vocational school, most of the students wish to implement the skill they have learned. They have to meet certain requirements in order to get work. One of the requirements is having sufficient skill in foreign language especially English. Learning English means learning language components and language skills. Grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, and spelling are examples of language components. Meanwhile, language skill covers listening, writing, reading, and speaking. Among the four skills, speaking is often considered as the most difficult skill to be learned by the students. learning to talk in the foreign language is often considered being one of the most difficult aspects of language learning for the teacher to help the students with. Helping the students develop the speaking skill not merely so that they can pass examination but also for more general use when they want to use the English in the outside world. They may need for further study, work or leisure, so that they will not be among the many people who unable to express his idea in English after having studied it for some years.  The teachers, therefore, are challenged to develop various teaching techniques. The variety of teaching techniques will help learners to get higher motivation to learn English. The motivation is the most powerful influences on learning.  In this research, teaching speaking using video is introduced. Video as an audio visual aids is beneficial for the teacher and students in English Language Teaching. Video can be used as an aid to teach the four skills namely reading, listening, speaking and writing. The video has so much to offer. The students love video because video presentation is interesting, challenging, and stimulating to watch. It also brings how people behave in culture whose language they are learning into the classroom. It enables students to have authentic experience in controlled environment. It is also contextualizing language naturally by showing real life into the classroom. Based on the phenomenon above, it is necessary to conduct a classroom action research. The principal foundations conducting this research are to solve the identified problem and to understand the effects of some interventions. These two principals are aimed to make improvement and to see change. The goals of conducting action research are to gain insight, to develop reflective practice, to effect positive changes in the school environment (and on educational practices in general), and to improve student outcomes and the lives of those involved. That’s why a collaboration classroom action research with a vocational school teacher to improve speaking skill of the second grade students conducted in this research. Speak English is used to improve student’s speaking ability, Written language is used to improve student’s writing ability. A lot of students have difficulity in writing because they are still confuse what should they write.

                   Chapter l

Introduction

                 Forms of language are spoken, and written that should be learned by the student. Writing is also a process. It should be learned by stages, from simple to complex, from a sentence to a composition. The very basic of writing ability is making sentence, because a sentences is the smallest unit to express thought, idea, opinion, and feeling. For someone who wants to be a good writer, he or she must master kinds of forms of sentences first. The paragraph is the group of sentence; sentence is the group of words is the group of letter, which has meaning. Writing from word, sentence to paragraph through internet is one of the techniques to guide the students to write simple sentences that is structured and controlled, beside that the student feel more interested in learning writing sentence through internet. Teaching writing from teacher conveys the material and student will easily elaborate the concrete information or example then, as a result of this technique; the students are able to follow and to pay attention. Clearly to the process and procedure that are express.

Chapter ll

Background of the study

1.     What  the writing is?

             Writing  is an aspect of language skill. Writing is the means of expressive activity as productive written aspect in la1nguage skills.. Writing is a means for communication. In particular conditions, we usually need to communicate by writing, like sending our letter to our teacher if we are sick and not possible to go to school or business’s needed. If it is activity that needs physical act, thought and energy. As we know, English include the four skills; they are listening and reading. Other skills are speaking and writing is the kind of English production. All people may have different and difficulties. In writing, as kind of English production, we need to express our thought by writing something that people can understand. Because of that our knowledge is very needed in order to be able to express our thought into writing. When we want write something but we do not know some vocabularies, it means that we have obstruction to write. In another case, if we make a mistake in choosing a word in our writing, the meaning will be different. Besides that, grammar is also considered as a big problem in writing activity. In this activity, we cannot use our gesture; it is because we do communication indirectly. In this communications we normally do not know reaction of the reader. Besides the difficulties explained above, actually, writing has advantages for us. In this case, time to think what we will say and what we will explain. We can anticipate the reader’s reaction by finding some question and try to answer it. From all statement above, the writer can conclude that writing is an expressive activity of thought, ideas, opinions, and feeling into written language which is like graphic symbols (letters or words) to be convoyed to one another. In another words, writing is means of communication. It can give people sources of information about everything. Nevertheless, procedurally writing is a thinking process. It means that writing is the process to break out ideas in mind into a piece of paper, and then organizing them in outline as writer’s planning in his composition. In this case, there is an effort of intellectual how to get idea. Therefore, in this study writer points out in writing is thinking process, especially breaking out the ideas in mind. The reason is the students lack of ideas in mind so they difficult.

2.  Tips To Improve Your Writing Ability

a.       Practice is everything.

                The single best way for you to improve your writing is to, well, keep writing. Practice may not necessarily make perfect, but it can help to develop those skills and improve them. Speaking for myself, I write every day for several hours a day. I have a couple longer posts that I do from time to time, but many of them are 500 words or less. I have a machine-gun style of writing for those clients (as well as on this blog). As a result of all this work, I’ve been called a pro blogger. Keep writing, daily if possible. It is only through continued practice that you will improve.

b.      Reading improves your writing.

           If all you do is restrain yourself to your own little mental world, you probably won’t improve your writing. In addition to all the writing I do each day, I also do a fair bit of reading. I check out dozens of other blogs on the Internet, I read plenty of tech news through the usual sources, and I check up on the local paper to see what’s happening in the world beyond the blogosphere. Just through pure osmosis, you will start to collect certain ideas and styles that you can integrate into your own writing. This is particularly useful for people who have English as a second language, because it exposes you to the little nuances that they may not teach you in formal English training.

c.       The power of free association.

In this respect, I may be a touch on the unconventional side. In school, they teach you that you should prepare a rough outline before you start writing your essay. By and large, I don’t do this. Instead, I just put fingers to keyboard and let the words flow out naturally. By doing this, each paragraph will feel more connected. You should have a rough idea in your head what you want to talk about, but I’m not a fan of formal outlines. After you’re reasonably happy with the length of your piece, re-read it in its entirety to fix any errors and ensure that the article is cohesive.

d.      Encourage feedback.

                   Don’t write in a vacuum. When you produce an essay in school, the teacher will return that essay to you with a letter grade and feedback. When you write a blog post, there is no formal evaluation process to tell you whether you did a good job or not. Sure, there’s the rate my post plug-in that you can try, but actual words are much more useful than a simple “star” rating. I’ve received comments about the calibre of the reviews I do at John Chow dot Com. People say that they’re comprehensive and well-written, but this wasn’t always the case. I remember the first ReviewMe I did on that site was not well received at all. I read the comments and adjusted my style accordingly, keeping the target audience in mind.

e.       Write as if you were speaking.

          I find that when some people sit down to write something, they take on an entirely different voice than the one they use when they are speaking. The net result is a body of text that feels contrived and artificial. It feels mechanical and that’s not what you want, especially when it comes to blogging. I’m not saying that you should write like you’re talking with your buddies over a beer, but you want the text to feel as natural as possible. Write as if you were either have a heart-to-heart with someone or you were giving some sort of public speech. My blog words are slightly elevated from everyday speech, but it’s still my voice.

    As you can see, there is much more to being a good writer than avoiding grammar mistakes. These tips are by no means exhaustive and they may not apply to all writers, but they have largely contributed to my advancement as a freelance writer. I hope that they have been helpful for any budding writers out there.

3.       Writing purphose

              There are four purposes why people write: The first purpose in writing is “to inform” anything such as fact, data, event, suggestion, and so on. By those are hopped that reader gets new knowledge and competency about all in this word. The second is “to persuade” the reader. By writing, writer hopes that the reader can establish his/her attitude whether he/she agrees or support the writer’s persuasion. The third is “to educate” the reader. To educate is one of purpose in writing because by writing, someone knowledge will be added. And it can entertain the reader.

Chapter lll

Finding the contradicting

                The writing activity can be any one of an at least five types, and is chosen by the teacher from a list when editing each page.

The types of activity are :

1.                                  Writing to answer the question.

  The student writes directly onto the web page, into a form text field. For the student, this text will stay there for the duration of the course, but will not be editable again. Each student will see their own text embedded on the page, and not that of other students. This activity is similar to a test, or a survey, or might be used to capture an opinion at the beginning of the course to compare with one at the end, aiding the development of met cognitive skills. The exact activity is directed by the teacher. It might require a summary of a text, restricted to a limited number of words, which promotes development of idea relation and revision.

2.                                   Constructing and discussing an opinion

This activity is similar to the discussion board above, except in this case the groups may be smaller than the whole class, and the discussions can be more structured. This process is intended to stimulate met cognitive learning by frequent revision of the document, the need to accommodate multiple opinions.

3.                                  Be aware to the possibility options

The last research is they can easily be added to the system in a modular way, allowing the software to adapt to the needs of the courses it implements and the development of the teacher.

Analyze

              The content of this study and the activities initiate can be analyze a lot of written discourse between students and the teacher, both private and public; promoting text production that is both meaningful and active. There are disadvantages and advantages of conducting so much discourse this way, and a teacher needs to remember to provide guidance in order to promote effective learning. The obvious difference with textual discourse is the medium of reading and writing, rather than speaking, listening, moving and watching. The main advantage of Internet-based discourse is the reduced dependence for participants to be in the same place at the same time. Another advantage is that contextual factors such as physical appearance, body language, accent and emotion do not distract from the text, giving greater equity among communicators. However, a disadvantage is that losing these "side-channels" of communication can also increase the probability that ambiguous text will be misunderstood. Discourse in this case, as anywhere else, is very much improved by increasing the context as much as possible, by explicitly providing cues as to the cultures and orientation of the writer and the reader.

Chapter lV

Conclusion

                    Writing well requires critical literacy, met cognition, and writing can be a powerful way to develop knowledge in the writer while constructing texts for others. Writing is skills that can be developed.  By mixing constructivist classroom approaches writing there are potentially many powerful benefits to be realized for both students and teachers. The writing of text can be taken for granted as an educational tool on the Internet. It is ubiquitous as a means of communication, but there are different ways it can be applied to promote learning, and it can be difficult for a teacher to focus on what sort of thinking they are trying to stimulate in their students. This paper concentrates on the practical application of educational theories of reading and writing, particularly in science education, in order to help the practitioner using the Internet for education. In conclusion, it could be said that writing instruction should be enriched with the Internet component, in order to provide students with choice, variety, authenticity, and regency and to give them a real purpose for writing, to allow them to experience the authentic written interaction with other people.

Reference

Kennedy, Mary Lynch et. al. 2002. Writing in The Disciplines a Reader for Writer. UK London: Prentice Hall Inc.
Bryne, Donne. 2001. Practical Guide to Writing with Additional Reading. United State of America.

http://btr.michaelkwan.com/2007/09/25/5/ Improving writing ability Barnet, Sylvar and Marcia Stubbs. 2002. Teaching Writing Skill. London: London group UK limited.