Kinds of sentences encountered in the headline articles of the Jakarta Post newspaper

Language is a means of communication. Human beings, who are social creatures, need to interact and communicate with others. By communication, people can express what they feel and what they think of others. Since English is a foreign language for Indonesian people, many people have difficulty in using the English in their communication. They face the problems in reading, speaking, listening, and writing. And the solution to reduce the difficulty in communicating with others in English is to use, listen, read, and write in English as much as they can. Since the writer has experienced and seen many people having difficulty in reading the news, especially the English newspaper, she was encouraged to find the kinds of sentences and their patterns in the Jakarta Post Newspaper, specifically in the headline articles. Writing is one of the vital language skills that a writer cannot neglect. In writing there are many aspects that the writer should pay attention, they are grammar, discourse, sentence complexity. According to the Traditional Grammar, a sentence is classified by the number and kinds of clauses. The kinds of sentences are simple, compound, complex, and compound-complex sentences. A simple sentence has only one independent clause, while a compound sentence has two or more independent clauses. The complex sentence contains one independent clause and one or more dependent clauses, and the compound-complex sentence contains two or more independent clauses and one or more dependent clauses. In this thesis the writer first tried to find out the kinds of sentences, the frequency of each kind of sentences, and the patterns of these kinds of sentences found in the headline articles of the Jakarta Post Newspaper. She randomly took 8 headline articles. The writer discovered that there were 167 sentences in the selected headline articles. From the result, the compound sentences took the first rank with the total occurrence of 104 (62.276 %), followed by simple sentences with the total occurrence of 53 (31.737 %). The compound and compound-complex sentences occurred with the total occurrence of 5 (2.994 %) each. In complex sentences there were five patterns with the number and percentage of occurrences; 1 IC plus1 DC = 59 (56.730 %), followed by pattern 1 IC + 2 DC with the total occurrence of 30 (28.846 %), pattern 1 IC + 3 DC with the total occurrence of 11 (10.577 %), pattern 1 IC + 4 DC with the total occurrence of 3 (2.885 %), and the last pattern 1 IC + 7 DC with the total occurrence of 1 (0.962 %). As far as a sentence does not contain more than one dependent clause, the reader will not get confused. Therefore the news writer should not make a sentence contain more than one dependent clause