Indonesian Orthographic Errors in Student Observation Reports at Senior High School

Abstract

Orthographic accuracy helps observation reports communicate factual information through consistent word forms and clear sentence boundaries. This study describes Indonesian orthographic errors in observation reports written by Grade X students at SMA Negeri 3 Palu during the 2025–2026 academic year. A descriptive qualitative design was employed. Data were obtained through classroom observation, a report writing task, and documentation of student texts. Analysis followed data reduction, data display, and conclusion drawing, with interpretations aligned with the fifth edition of the Enhanced Indonesian Orthography guidelines. The reported examples revealed inappropriate capitalization of common words, lowercase country names, inconsistent separation of prepositions and passive prefixes, nonstandard abbreviations, inaccurate technical vocabulary, and problems with sentence punctuation. Illustrative corrections include “indonesia” to “Indonesia,” “di observasi” to “diobservasi,” and “didalam nya” to “di dalamnya.” The analysis also distinguishes integrated Indonesian technical terms from Latin scientific names and ordinary lexical misspellings, preventing unrelated forms from being grouped indiscriminately as loanword errors. These findings suggest that instruction should connect orthographic rules with grammatical function, report organization, and purposeful revision. Teachers can use short contextual editing tasks, terminology lists, and guided peer review to help students explain their corrections. Because corpus size and category frequencies were not specified in the research documentation, the findings describe error forms rather than prevalence or comparative error rates. Further research should document the corpus transparently and investigate whether contextual editing instruction improves accuracy across successive writing tasks. The study contributes contextual examples that link formal conventions with decisions made during authentic report writing.