Do Teenage Writers Figure Their Stories?

摘要

This article discusses types of figures of speech used by teenage writers in their story texts. Eighteen writers as students of Junior High Schools were selected to get a training of how to effectively exploit Indonesian language to compose a story text. Data in the forms of figures of speech were collected, of which then were analyzed to their classification and how they are used by the writers in the texts. The findings show that most the writers only select two types of figures of speech, i.e. personification and simile for their texts. Such figures of speech are classified into two functions, namely for describing the events and the setting of the stories. The teenage writers show strategies in using the figures of speech. Some of them are represented directly in naration of the story, while some others are executed through utterances in dialogs. The limited variations of figures of speech performed by the writers might suggest that most of them do not have good power of expression, especially with many types of figures of speech. Language teachers should consider this phenomenon in relation to the process of language learning at school.