The Importance Of Descriptive Writing

Writing is one of the four major skills in English, which has to be mastered by the students. Writing classified as one of productive skills which enables students to be creative in producing the ideas related to the topic that they are asked to write. On the other hand, the students should produce the language in written form as a means of communication between the writers and the reader. In writing, students are free to express their ideas, thoughts, feelings, opinions, beliefs, arguments, information, or even their experience into a written form. It can be such a way for the writer to convey the messages to the readers in order to make the readers know what the writer is trying to share. As Pincas (1998) stated that writing is a way of communicating

Based on the study done by Husna, Zainil and Rozimela (2013) the students often found some difficulties in writing a descriptive text, although they have been guided by their teachers to write it. Some difficulties are as follows: First, students are not able to develop the ideas; some students wrote many main ideas in one paragraph; the idea of the paragraph was still ambiguous and sometimes not clear. Second, students found it difficult in organizing the ideas to write a descriptive text. Most of the times, the paragraph needs more than a unified point. It means that a paragraph needs a reasonable organization or sequence. Therefore the students need to organize their ideas into good paragraph or readable. In order to do it, the students can organize their ideas by identifying the topic and give the descriptions about the topic. Third, students found difficulties in grammar. Grammatical problem will influence on how words are put together to form the correct sentences or meaningful. Fourth, some students were still in doubt with choosing the correct words while composing descriptive text. Lack of vocabularies made the students confused in developing their ideas. In this case the students have to choose the correct words that they need. Last, students’ difficulty related to spelling, punctuation and capitalization. Moreover, as stated in the study, even though the quality of the students’ test is satisfactory, but the students still have problem in composing the text such as unable to transfer and develop their idea into a written form well, fail to show well-organized writing, did not write a list of their ideas; they just directly wrote what they thought without planning, the students’ insufficient vocabularies, and the students' habit to put the words which were unsuitable contextually.

To improve the students’ achievement