Rabu, 12 Maret 2014

THREE COMPONENTS OF WRITING SKILL

There are three components to writing skill. They are grammatical skill, compositional skill, and domain knowledge. 1.Grammatical skill: Grammatical skill is the ability to construct meaningful sentences. It is the ability to construct sentences, not the ability to diagram them, which is necessary for writing. We all have a basic degree of grammatical skill. We could not communicate without it. When people say that everyone can write, I suspect that they mean simply that everyone can construct meaningful sentences and record them on paper. Not quite everyone qualifies to this standard, but in the developed world, most people do. We can develop a much higher level of grammatical skill than mere literacy requires. Some people can construct complex and beautiful sentences with ease. A certain elegance, fluidity, and grace in the construction of a sentence is one of the hallmarks of a good writer in all fields. 2.Compositional skill: Compositional skill is the ability to organize words to produce an effect. Storytelling is a compositional skill. A compelling lecture or blog post displays compositional skill. The ability to express ideas systematically and comprehensively belongs to the composition skill. Compositional skill is not an extension of grammatical skill. It is a separate skill. 3.Domain knowledge: Many technical writers would vehemently deny that domain knowledge is a component of writing skill. Some even go so far as to suggest that ignorance of the subject domain is an asset, that it allows them to appreciate the perspective of the user. However, domain knowledge is important for other reasons than knowledge of the subject matter, as important as that may be. Every decent writer will acknowledge that it is important to know your reader. Technical writers often go to great lengths to collect data on their audience, to construct personas so that they have a model of who they are writing for. There is still another component to domain knowledge. Every domain has its communication conventions. This is in part its language, its jargon, but it goes beyond this. Particular domains have compositional conventions that guide how communications in the field are structured. The existence of these compositional conventions in different domains has two important consequences for our consideration of what constitutes writing skill. The first is that knowledge of the domain combined with sufficient grammatical skill can allow many people to write successfully for others within their domain. The second is that writers from outside the domain, even if they are possessed of great compositional skills, will often fail to communicate in the domain because they don’t know its compositional conventions. What they write might be brilliantly composed, but it will confuse the reader because it does not conform the the conventions they are used to. If we have both compositional skill and domain knowledge, this will allow you to exploit and refine the conventions of the domain to achieve a higher degree of communication. But there is an important caveat to the ability of domain knowledge to compensate for the lack of compositional skill. Domain knowledge, with its attendant knowledge of the compositional forms of the domain, may allow those with little compositional skill to write successfully within their domain, but it does not suffice for communicating outside the domain. http://everypageispageone.com/2011/09/15/three-components-of-writing-skill/

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Banjarbaru, Kalimantan Selatan, Indonesia