Elements of writing

Many students have difficulties in writing. They are many elements of writing that must be mastered by students in order to be a good writer:

1) Organization

It contains reasonable sentences that support the topic of the writing. The ideas of the students are well organized and can be understood by the reader.

2) Content

Content refers to the sentences that flow easily and not too hard to understand although a simple writing. The reasonable sentences that arranged into good story here that is meant by the content.

3) Grammar

Grammar is connecting with how the words are arranged into good sentences. Good means correct in the tenses and has meaning. Some students got the problem with this. This is because some of them still confuse what verbs that should be used in the sentence.

4) Punctuation

When the students write they have to think about the punctuation or spelling that is used in writing. It will make their writing sounds reasonable to read. The pause is also needed when they read a text. The capital letter is also important when they write the first word in a sentence. This ability needs careful practice.

5) Style

Style deals with the precise vocabulary usage and the use of parallel structure. Vocabulary takes important role in English. Vocabulary is the basic thing that should be owned by students. Without that, they cannot do many kind of English task. The lack of vocabulary means failure in communication. So in writing students must have enough vocabulary to make it succeed.

Harris stated that (1969:68-69) there are four elements of writing, they are:

1). Mastering Vocabulary

He stated that vocabulary’s mastering plays an important role in a language, especially in the writing activity. The choice of vocabulary could describe the writer’s knowledge. The number of words that is mastered by a writer could indicate that he/she mastered a number of concepts, mastery of vocabulary can improve by reading and listening a lot. Furthermore, Keraf (1982:16) said that the vocabulary’s mastering could be observed from two sides, those were quantitative and qualitative. Quantitative vocabulary’s mastering is defined as a must for the students to master the vocabulary in a language as much as possible, in this case, the students should master the vocabulary actively, it means that they are able to use vocabulary in communication. Qualitative vocabulary’s mastering consist of knowledge, meaning of words and structure of words, Qualitative vocabulary’s mastering will support the students to choose the appropriate words, so it can support the effectiveness of using language. The mastering of quantitative and qualitative vocabulary is a must. The mastering of quantitative vocabulary is the first demand to broaden a draft, while the mastering of qualitative vocabulary is the second demand to deepen the knowledge of words.

2) Mastering Grammatical Rule’s / Sentence Structure.

Mastering grammatical rule’s / sentence structure consists of phonology, morphology and syntax. Phonological rules don’t have any roles in the writing activity, while morphological and syntactical rules play some important roles in the writing activity, it deals with the effective use of the right affixes, conjunction, prefixes and composition, the structure of the sentences.

3) Coherence

Coherence means that the writer’s paragraph is easy to read and understand because the supporting sentences are in some kind of logical order and the ideas are connected by use of appropriate transition signals.

4) Spelling

One of the most difficult and confusing aspects of the English language is spelling system. There is often a discrepancy between the pronunciation of a word and its spelling. They cannot always know how to spell a word by its pronunciation or how to pronounce it by its spelling, to avoid this problem; the students are suggested to open dictionaries before they are going to write.

So, writing is not only having amount of vocabularies and knowing the grammatical structures, but also mastering all elements of writing above. All messages we delivered will be acceptable by all communicants if we mastered those elements.