Abdu Ahmed

Improving Writing Skills: Grammar, Content, Organization, Punctuation and Capitalization Abdu Ahmed

Although writing is a very important skill for social, political and technological development, most students have difficulties on this skill. It is observed that Ethiopian students in general, higher institution students in particular have the problem of writing. The main purpose of the study was, thus, to analyze the writing difficulties Haramaya University students encountered in their writing. Purposive sampling was used in the selection of the setting and the subjects of the study. Document analysis (Students? test papers) and interview methods were used to collect the data. The data was analyzed using qualitative methods. The findings of the study revealed that the students failed to construct even simple sentences. Students? writings were laden with critical errors that showed how serious the writing problems were. Grammatical problems, (syntactic problems like sentence fragments, run-on sentence, wrong use of the passive voice, lack of subject verb agreement, tense and lack of parallelism) are the main ones followed by organization, content, punctuation, spelling, choice of diction and capitalization. Moreover, what was revealed from the findings was that the methods of tea