Undergraduate Students’ Ability in Writing Argumentative Essay at Universitas Negeri Padang

Writing has a significant impact in determining students’ capability and quantity in academic activities in language learning at schools or colleges. One of the essays display in English academic writing is an argumentative essay. Writing an argumentative essay leads students to explore their opinions or arguments to convince the reader. Nevertheless, some studies pointed out the students faced some difficulties in writing an argumentative essay. Firstly, the students faced challenges referred to developing and organizing ideas. Secondly, the students encountered struggles in producing solid evidence in their writing. Therefore, they still cannot write an argumentative essay clearly and convincingly. In writing a good and readable argumentative essay, some aspects that need to consider by students involve scientific arguments or ideas, rhetorical features, and convince the reader to accept their point of view in writing. The objective of this study was to find out the students' ability in writing an argumentative essay properly. This study belongs to descriptive research with a qualitative approach. The data were taken from the final test of essay writing subject written by 25 students in the third semester of the English language and Literature Department at Universitas Negeri Padang. The data have been collected through document analysis. The data were analyzed by using Reinking and Osten’s (2017) theory. The research finding showed that the ability of students to write an argumentative essay was categorized as average, with a mean score of 68. The result indicated that the students were required to improve and develop their ability to write an argumentative essay correctly and convincingly.