Student Writing Skills

As foreign language learners, college students are really expected to master the four major skills of English: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Those skills need to be developed by students because each of them has its significance and importance. Therefore, acquiring those skills have to be balanced. Students must be competent in English not only in the oral skills, but also in the written skills. The focus of this research is writing skill.

Writing is really needed to master by students because writing is a good way to develop students’ ability of using vocabulary and grammar and increasing the ability of using language (Nguyen, 2015). It can be seen that for language learners, writing is not only a way to express ideas, thought,

It aims to avoid the use of personal pronoun in writing. The personal pronoun such “I” or “We” is not encouraged in academic and scientific writing even though it depends on the discipline and the nature of the technical writing. The use of 3nd person is encouraged in academic writing in many disciplines (Johanne, 2002). In addition, Swan (2005) asserts that passive voice is commonly used in academic and scientific writing. The kind of passive voice commonly used is passive voice without agent. It is because the use of passive voice makes the writing more formal and scientific. Moreover, in academic writing the writer frequently does not focus on the person who is doing the action, but the thing that is receiving the action. Thus, the use of passive voice is extremely useful in academic writing due to the fact that it allows writers to highlight the most important participants or events within sentences by placing them in the beginning of the sentence. Not only that, in academic writing the use of the personal pronoun “I” or “We” must be avoided because it makes the messages of the writing become inflammatory. Thus, the use of the 3nd person is suitable in academic writings. The 3nd person is used in passive voice so that passive voice seems very useful to construct sentences in academic writings to make those writings more formal and

The difficulties may appear due to two factors: the lack of confidence and the habit of using active voice. The lack of confidence may appear due to the lack of grammar while the habit of using active voice may appear due to the fact that the students are inhabit in using passive voice when writing, or it is also happened because of the lack of grammar. Because the students frequently use active voice rather than passive voice while writing, they make errors when trying to use passive voice sentences in their writing. Thus, the habit of mixing of using both active and passive voice has to be gained in academic writings in certain conditions: formal or informal and direct or indirect. Then the use both active and passive voice has to be balanced based on the appropriate purposes and situations. The result is the errors may not appear, and the information of the writings can be caught and understood by the reader