Abstract :
Writing is one of the communication skills that must be mastered by
students in order to convey opinions, feelings and information in written
form. The purpose of this study were to know how students? skill in writing
descriptive essay and what types of cohesion and the ways to achieve
coherence used on descriptive essay at fourth semester of English Study
Program at University of Pasir Pengaraian.
This research used quantitative research. Total sampling technique was
applied of this research with the total were 36 students. In collecting the data,
the researcher used a writing test with several topic choices in writing
descriptive essay and determine the types of cohesion and the ways to
achieve coherence in their descriptive essays. In analyzing the data, the
researcher used the components in writing, namely Content, Organization,
Vocabulary, Language Use, Mechanic and analyze the result of the types
cohesion and the ways to achieve coherence they used based on the types of
cohesion and the ways to achieve coherence.
The research findings showed that the students' skill in writing
descriptive essays in the fourth semester was in the fair level with the score
69,31 with content 21.01 score had the fair to poor level, organization with
14.52 score had the good to average level, vocabulary with 14 score had good
to average level, language use with 16.74 score had fair to poor level and in
mechanics with 3.34 score had fair to poor level and the types of cohesion
used were 60,50% used reference on their descriptive essay and followed by
31,55 % conjunction, 5,51 % substitution, 1,35 % reiteration, 0,96 %
collocation, and 0.09 % ellipsis. Then, in the ways to achieve coherence also
used 61,42 % repeating key nouns, 31,69% used consistent pronoun, 4,42%
used transition signals to link ideas and 2,45% in arranging ideas in logical
order. It means students were quite capable of writing descriptive essay and
they have used all of the types of cohesion and the ways to achieve coherence
but they still need to be improved.