WHAT IS TESTING WRITING...

TESTING WRITING is when a writing test is used as a tool to measure the ability skills in writing. The test also as an instrument for language teacher to measure students ability to write in English. The purpose of writing test is also to discover students creativity, imaginative, or even intelligent, have wide general knowledge, or have good reasons for the opinions they happen to hold.

During the early stages of learning, written exercises will generally be used simply to reinforce the learning specific grammatical points or lexical item, only later will be treated as a medium that involves the abilities and creative way in expressing idea on written form.

Although the writing process has been analyzed in many different ways, most teachers would probably agree in recognizing at least the five general components. They are:

1. Content: the substance of writing; the idea expressed.
2. Form: the organization of the content.
3. Grammar: the employment of grammatical forms and syntactic pattern.
4. Style: the choice of structures and lexical items to give a particular tone or flavour to the writing
5. Mechanics: the use of the graphic conventions of the language.

To sum up, we can see the above characteristics show that the writing process, as commonly conceived is a highly sophisticated skill combining a number of diverse elements, only some of which are strictly linguistic.

WHAT IS MEANT BY WRITING...

5 DEFINITIONS OF WRITING

1. Writing is a process as well as a product. The final text is only the end result, and how you get there is just as important as where you end up. Good writers are good, not because they sit down and write effortlessly, turning out beautiful sentences without sweat. They are good because they believe that eventually, after lots of work and time and discarded drafts, they will come up with something worth a reader's attention.

2. Writing is discovery. You do not write because you know what you think; you write to find out what you think. And the more you write and re-write, the clearer and more interesting your thinking becomes.

3. Writing is social. You may feel that you have to be alone to write, and this may be physically true. But your writing is saturated with the presence of others: your society, your culture, and your readers. Writing is not complete until it has reached, physically and intellectually, the audience for whom it was intended. As Ezra Pound put it, writing means that "You not only get a thing off your own chest, but you get it into someone else's." Your enrollment in a composition course makes you an important contributing member of a supportive, committed writing community.

4. Writing is self-taught. You learn to write by doing it, not by listening to somebody tell you about it. In this way it is like learning to ride a bike: although it helps to have someone hold the handlebars the first few times, the best way to get good at it is to ride every day.

5. Writing is a series of choices. Most people who fear writing see it as a confusing maze of rules they are in danger of breaking: rules like "Never begin a sentence with 'And,'" "Don't use 'I' in formal writing," "Write complete sentences, not fragments." But if writing were only a set of rules, learning to write effectively would be as easy as mastering the multiplication tables. Effective writers don't just follow rules--they also make choices, after thinking long and hard about the consequences of those choices. And that is why good writing is always interesting.

AN OVERVIEW...

Hello every one! Thank you and welcome to this blog; testing writing . We welcome all the writing test makers, teachers, and every one whom involve in the world of test designing especially in writing test. This blog can give some information on the testing of writing skill in the Teaching of English as Second Language. We hope that it will assists those who are already involved and also to those who are interested in test designing especially writing test.

"the good test is an obedient servant since it follow and apes the teaching"

Davies (1968:5)

BLOG DESIGNERS:

1. AMAR SHAUFY B. ABDULLAH (A 112970)

2. NOOR HAZWANI BT. HASSAN (A 112005)