The Process of Writing:
How Students Write an Academic
Writing Task
Iis Suryani
This study was a case study, involving seven students who were taking a course of academic reading and writing in Graduate Studies in English. The process approach was implemented in this academic writing class. The goals of the study were to find how students generated and developed ideas as they wrote, as well as the stages of their writing process. The others were to identify the constraints experienced by the students when writing and how they coped with those problems, and to explore the resources they used to achieve their writing goals. Over six months of conducting the research; field notes, transcribed retrospective interviews, and responses from questionnaire served as the data.
The results showed that students generated and developed ideas as they wrote, using their own strategies with certain principles: specificity, manageability, curiosity, significance, and familiarity. All participants went through the basic phases of the writing process: prewriting, drafting, revising. They showed the different stages in the production of a piece of writing. As well, they went through their writing process in a recursive way. In addition, they had experienced writer’s block with procedural was likely to be the major problems shared by all participants. Physical was the second rank, followed by psychological, magnitude and unrealistic attitude. Other problems like time management and interruption tended to be individual. Problems and solutions are very closely dependent; they tried to cope with their problems by accomplishing appropriate strategies. Two most chosen strategies were among others: taking a break, reading or finding references. Other strategies—writing out and freewriting—were next. They gained the information as reliable sources ranging from electronic sources, print sources, and even database from questionnaire.
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Suryaani,
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