The Sources of Student’s Ideas in Writing Descriptive Text at SMAN 1 Meulaboh

In the learning process of descriptive text, the students are often commanded to write a descriptive text based on what they are interested in. The students have to select their ideas to create a creative descriptive writing. Idea is one of the important parts in writing process. Without idea, the students cannot start to write because they do not have anything in their mind for writing process. The previous studies in this area have tended to focus predominantly on how a strategy could help the students to generate their ideas in writing descriptive text. The present research aims to identify and describe the sources of student’s ideas in writing descriptive text. Twelve participants were given open-ended questionnaire and interviewed by the researcher. The findings reveal there are four sources of ideas used by the students in writing descriptive text: imagination, observation, asking people and experience. The findings also indicate that it is easier for most of the students to obtain the ideas from beyond themselves than within themselves.