Developing Logical Divisions of Ideas in University Students? Expository Essays

The objectives of this study toward the considerable knowledge of writing are to find out (1) the logical divisions of ideas development in university students expository essays, and (2) university students problems related to the development of logical divisions of ideas in writing expository essays. In order to investigate logical divisions of ideas, the researchers used a qualitative research fundamentally involved an in-depth interpretation of data. Participants were three university students who contributed data to the research in terms of expository essays documents and interviews. In an attempt to analyze these instruments, three main steps were worth considering (1) measuring the coverage of a topic sentence, supporting sentences, and a concluding sentence in each expository essay, and (2) exploring logical divisions of ideas in each paragraph with respect to how unity, coherence and cohesion were directly related to each other, and (3) interpreting the likelihood of participants problems in writing the essays. As might have been expected, the research findings show that the first essay inaccurately presented unity, coherence and cohesion in its introductory paragraph. The first body paragraph demonstrated unity, coherence or cohesion. The second and third body paragraphs elaborated unity and coherence significantly, but they lacked cohesion. The second essay presented unity and coherence in its introductory paragraph, but it lost its cohesion. The second and the third body paragraphs did not qualify unity, coherence and cohesion. Unfortunately, its second body paragraph contained the coherence whereas its unity and cohesion were elusively problematic. The last essay performed both unity and coherence in its introductory paragraph, and body paragraphs, yet they missed cohesion without question. The participants problems in proving the unity ranged from the difficulties in finding out the essay topic, integrating ideas to the inappropriate development of ideas. In terms of cohesion, they found it difficult to determine correct dictions due to poor mastery of vocabulary, neologism, connections between sentences and paragraphs, and use of correct transition signals. The cohesion was unclearly stated since there were no linkages of ideas between sentences and paragraphs considerably. The emergent problems prevailing in participants expository essays indicated illogical divisions of ideas in explaining key terms. Besides, the topics development was not well-grounded because of difficulties in setting out the generic structure of the expository essay and its organization of ideas.