Writing Journal Articles: Ways to Improve Student Writing Skills

In the case of Pakistan, writing is considered a painful task that shows that oral tradition is much better than writing one. Student activities are adequately stored in libraries, although publishing that is more appropriate. Therefore, it is necessary to develop students' ability to write effectively i.e., write journal articles. This review article is therefore intended to discuss ways to improve student writing skills by writing journal articles. The effect of interacting with the various related texts can be concluded by the fact that the ability to write can be explained differently depending on the purpose of teaching and how to deal with it. Meanwhile, the ability to write journal articles is categorized as one of the Process Comprehension-based writing skills. Among the basic ways to publish students, manuscripts are to look at the structure of a journal article, the writing guide, and the style of the journal in which the manuscript is intended to be published. By using the journal writing tips, Pakistani students will not only improve their writing skills but also make their careers more relevant. In short, in addition to publishing student works, writing a journal essay is essential to developing their writing skills.

University students are engaged a lot in doing school projects which might be done through research such as course projects as approved in the course contracts or final research project to fulfill their Bachelor degree. Their projects results are actually useful for either enriching their own knowledge and experience or contributing to a certain related field of science if they are published, so that everybody can access them easily. However, what has been commonly done by students towards their works is documenting their works in the form of research reports which are commonly kept in the library or thrown away. Their research results become less meaningful, because they have not been read or they are only read by a certain group of society - usually their younger generation intakes. To make the students' works be more meaningful, they need to be communicated and disseminated in conferences or seminars and publish them in journal articles. The main problem of not publishing their works is that they do not really know how to compose articles for journals. This indicates the critical needs of equipping the students with the strategies and tips of writing journal articles. Hence, this article is intended to discuss the skills of writing, the conceptual understanding of journal articles and their characteristics, and strategies of writing journal articles. This is not only essential to improve their writing skills, particularly the skill of writing journal article, but to contribute to the advancement of related research-based knowledge.

It is believed that writing is important and frequently used in people's daily lives either as individual such as writing application letter, messages, and dissemination of the research results or member of society such as in a workplace issue. Writing is also taught in formal education considering the importance of having ability and good skills of writing. Yet, it is not easy to define the ability of writing. There are various definitions of writing ability according to different approaches of the teaching of writing. As mentioned in Yi, there are three approaches, namely Product-Text Oriented Approach, Process-Cognitive-Oriented Approach, and Genre-Based Approach. According to Text-Oriented Approach, writing ability is viewed as the capacity to produce “acontextually” correct forms of language; following prescribed patterns at either sentence or discourse level. Meanwhile, on the basis of Process-Cognitive Approach which is focused on what the writer does during the process of writing, writing ability is defined to initiate and evolve ideas and then use certain revising and editing practices to develop them to maturity in a given context. A teacher who believes this view encourage students to develop power over their own writing without being directive, assuming that writing is a creative act and that the process is important as a discovery of the true self. As Grabe and Kaplan in Yi, note that learners are encouraged to look for their own authentic voices and freely express them. Accordingly, the writing activities are like to be personal essays and journal writing which are suitable for self-discovery. Indeed, from this point of view, the writing ability is defined as the ability to express oneself freely. Finally, in accordance to Genre-Based Approach which stressed on awareness of the readers, regards successful writers as those who are able to make reasonable assumptions about what the reader knows and expects, to seek a balance between their writing purpose, and to satisfy a given discourse community with regard to the structure and content of the discourse and communicate functionally. 

In short, there are several theoretical definitions of writing ability from different pedagogical approaches with which English teachers can consider establishing definition appropriate with their own pedagogical needs.