Types of Writing

a.             Types of Writing

Brown (2004:220) explains types of writing. There are four categories of written performance that capture the range of written production are typically identified as follows.

1)             Imitative

 Imitative means to produce written language, the learner must attain skills in the fundamental basic tasks of writing letters, words, punctuation, and very brief sentences. It is a level at which learners are trying to master the mechanics of writing. At this stage, form is the primary if not exclusive focus, while context and meaning are secondary concern.

2)             Intensive

Beyond the fundamentals of imitative writing are skills in producing appropriate vocabulary within a context, collocations, idioms and correct grammatical features up to the length of a sentence. Meaning and context are some of importance in determining correctness and appropriateness, but most assessment tasks are more concerned with a focus on form.

3)             Responsive

Here, assessment tasks require learners to perform at a limited discourse level, connecting sentences into a paragraph and creating a logically connected sequence of two or three paragraphs. Form focused attention is mostly at the discourse level with a strong emphasis on context and meaning.

4)             Extensive

      It implies successful management of all the process and strategies of writing for all purposes. Writers focus on achieving a purpose, organizing and developing ideas logically, engaging in the process of multiple drafts to achieve a final product.

Since writing is a process of transferring ideas or thoughts which are transformed into written form which is contextually acceptable, difficulties are often faced by students. Teacher’s roles both to develop their own ideas and to facilitate them in conducting the steps of writing process are intended to ease students act in writing some writing performance such the types of writing explained above. Because the sample is senior high school students so it is hoped that they can write a text in the extensive category.

2.        Genres of Writing

The word genre comes from the French (and originally Latin) word for 'kind' or 'class'. The term is widely used in rhetoric, literary theory, media theory, and more recently linguistics, to refer to a distinctive type of text. (http://en.wikipedia.org)

Hyland (2002:17) states genres thus provide us with resources for getting things done in all areas of life. Teaching genres involves increasing learners’ awareness of the conventions of writing help them produce texts that seem well-formed and appropriate to readers. Texts are similar or different because of the sociocultural purposes they are intended to serve and the ways they are structured to achieve these. Genre theories assume that the organization of a text can be described in relation to others, and to the choices and constraints acting on the writer in a particular social context.

As students prepare to write, they need to think about the purpose of their writing. Setting the purpose for writing is important because purpose influences students’ decision to make about form. According to Educational Unit-Oriented Curriculum English Subject syllabus of senior high school, it is stated some genres of writing to be mastered by students, they are descriptive, narrative, recount, procedure, report, news item, exposition, spoof, explanation, discussion and review. According to Gerot and Wignel (1994:192), the use of the genres are:

a.         Spoof is to retell an event with humorous twist

b.        Recount is to retell events for the purpose of informing and entertaining

c.         Report is to describe the way things are, with reference to a range of natural, man- made, and social phenomenon in our environment.

d.        Analytical exposition is to persuade the reader or listener that something is the case.

e.         News item is to inform readers, listener or viewers about events of the day which are considered newsworthy or important.

f.         Anecdote is to share with others an account for unusual or amusing  incident.

g.        Narrative is to amuse, entertain and to deal with actual or vicarious experience in different ways, it deals with problematic events which lead to a crisis of turning points of some kinds, which in turn find a resolution.

h.        Procedure is to describe how something is accomplished through a sequence of action steps.

i.          Description is to describe a particular person, place or things.

j.          Hortatory exposition is to persuade the reader or listener that something should or should not be the case.

k.        Explanation is to explain the process involved in the formation or working of natural or socio cultural phenomena

l.          Discussion is to present two points of view about issue.

m.      Review is to critique an art of work or event for public audience.

Every genre has a number of characteristics and it has the specific purpose which makes it different from other genres. In this study, it is only focused on recount text.

3.        Recount Text

       Hyland (2002:99) states that Recounts ‘tell what happened’. The purpose of a recount text is to document a series of events and evaluate their significance in some way and to tell a sequence of events so that it entertains. So, recount text is a text that retells past events, usually in the order in which they happened. The function of a recount text is to inform or entertain the listeners or readers.