The rhetorical patterns of argumentative composition of the English Department students of Widya Mandala Catholic University Surabaya

Writing skill is an important skill because in writing, the students can express their ideas through a composition, and they also need to read a lot in order to be able to produce such a good composition. There are several kinds of composition such as: narrative, descriptive, explanation, and also argumentative composition. In this study, the writer chose the argumentative composition because argument happens every day (White and Billings, 2005: 4). To create a good argumentative composition, a well-organized pattern is needed. There are several types of patterns in constructing a composition, such as Classical Model of Argument, Toulmin Model of Argument, and Rogerian Model of Argument. This study is intended to reveal the rhetorical patterns frequently found in the students’ argumentative compositions of the English Department of Widya Mandala Catholic University Surabaya specifically to the Classical Model of Argument. The writer decided to study about this model of argument since she realized that Clasical Model of Argument is the one that nearly similar with the model that is taught to the students of Widya Mandala Catholic University Surabaya. To carry out this study, the writer took the students of the English Department of Widya Mandala Catholic University Surabaya who took Writing 3 and who belonged to B class as the subjects of this study. The data were taken from their final exam papers. The analysis of the data covered some steps. The first step was finding the propositions of the students’ argumentative compositions and making the rhetorical pattern of the composition. Then, the rhetorical patterns which had been found were shown in the form of diagrams. The data which had been analyzed and made into diagram of the rhetorical pattern were organized and classified into certain types. The last step was constructing conclusions. The analysis of the rhetorical patterns of the students’ argumentative compositions of the English Department of Widya Mandala Catholic University Surabaya showed that only two of the students’ compositions were truly linear. The other compositions were linear but with incomplete evidence in the conclusion, and linear with indirect conclusion. Based on these findings, it can be concluded that all students under study had not mastered the Plato-Aristotelian style of writing especially to the Classical model of argument quite well. They still face some difficulties in connecting the ideas in the conclusion. Concerning the result of this study, it is suggested that the teacher should keep training the students to make a composition based on the Plato-Aristotelian style by always giving exercises to them, and also ask the to read lots of argumentative composition so that they can improve their knowledge about the Plato-Aristotelian style of writing