5 Aspect of Good Writings

1. Content or Ideas
- A written test should have excellent support, unity, and completeness in
its content. Unity means that paragraph discusses one main idea from
beginning to end and every supporting sentence must directly explain or
prove the main idea (Oshima and Hogue, 2006)
2. Organization
- A written text with good organization is a text which has clear introductory
paragraph, well-organized body paragraph, and concluding paragraph. It
should have coherence and cohesion.
- Coherence means hold together, there must be no sudden jumps and
the movement from one sentence to the next sentence must be logical
and smooth.
- Cohesion means the supporting sentences stick together in their support
of the topic sentence.
3. Grammar
- The rule about how word change their form and combine with other
words to make sentences (The 3rd Edition of Cambridge Advance
Learners Dictionary)
- The following consideration may serve as a guidelines:
a. The grammatical features should be appropriate for students
developmental stages.
b. The grammatical features should reflect students writing needs for the
course of for future writing
c. When possible, assigned course reading should be sources of text
analysis so that grammar focus is integrated with other prewriting
activities
d. The lessons should generally be kept brief, especially for less advanced
writers.
e. The instructor may want to enhance the texts by underlining or bolding
certain elements, especially those that are not very salient for some
learners.
4. Word Choice or Word Form
- Decarrico (2001: 288) advices new words should not be presented in
isolation and should not be learned by simple note memorization. It is
important that new vocabulary items be presented in contexts rich
enough to provide clues to meaning and that students be given multiple
exposure to items they should learn.
- Exercise and activities include learning words in word association lists,
focusing on highlighted words in texts, and playing vocabulary games.
More recently, computer programs that include the sounds of the words as
well as illustrate pictures provide opportunity for practice with a society of
context, both in written and spoken
5. Mechanics
- A good written test should have good written mechanism too. Mechanics
refer to letter recognition, letter discrimination, word recognition, and
basic rules of spelling, punctuation, and capitalization, as well as
recognition of whole sentences and paragraphs
- If the student write written test with good mechanics, the written test will
be more understandable to read. As a result, student need practicing a lot
to be able to write with good written mechanism
- Set of specification:
a. Task Description: to present students with the goal of the task and its
importance. There are many task can be used, such as matching tasks,
practical tasks, emotive writing tasks, etc.
b. Content description: to represent students with possible content areas
that might be relevant to the task
c. Audience description: to guide students in developing and
understanding of the intended audience, needs, and expectation
d. Format cues: to help students in planning the overall organizational
structure of the written product
e. Linguistic cues: to help students make use of certain grammatical
structures and vocabulary choice
f. Spelling and Punctuation Cues: to help students focus their attention
on spelling rules which they have learned and eventually on the need
to use the dictionary for checking accuracy of spelling, and to guide
students to use acceptable punctuation