Organization of Descriptive Writing with Reference to the Writings of the Students of Certificate Course in English for School Leavers, Uva Wellassa University of Sri Lanka

Abstract

This research papers attempts to discuss the organization of fifty descriptive writings by the students of Certificate Course in English for School Leavers (CCESL) offered by the Centre for Open & Distance Learning of Uva Wellassa University of Sri Lanka. This discussion is carried out through qualitative analysis of schematic organization, choice of the themes and themes development. Amongst many elements required for any piece of writing to be well accepted, organization of a written text is a salient element in producing a meaningful and purposive text. Thus, knowing the students’ competency in writing an accepted text would be worthwhile to assess the standard of writing. For this research, a qualitative approach is applied by employing a few theories proposed by Gerot and Wignell (1995), and Eggins (2004) respectively. It is interesting to find that most of the students are familiar with local and topical themes while hardly any number paying attention to foreign text familiarity. However, thematic development and repeating chosen them seem common in their writing. Based on the discussion of writings of the students of CCESL, it was found that the organization of their writing was more perfunctory and less organized as a considerable number of written texts do no have either beginning and end or middle or one of the three elements. Further, their writing seems to be dull as they were not employed myriad sentence structures in their writing which in other terms reveal that their skills in writing has to be improved to a satisfactory level. As a remedy, it is suggested that students ought to undergo a rigorous practice in writing to learn as to how to organize their ideas on given texts in producing descriptive written discourses.