EPH Publishing, RM8.50, ISBN 978-967-254-295-7
Education, 2024

Most SPM Bahasa Melayu books that purportedly help candidates tackle the Kertas 1, or the composition paper, tend to focus on telling candidates what to write, but not as frequently how to write.

Hence, candidates with lower proficiency in the language will look at those books and wonder what they are supposed to do. Memorize the model compositions and everything else?

For those candidates, EPH Publishing has one workbook just for them: Praktis Penulisan Terbaik Bahasa Melayu SPM, or Best Writing Practices for SPM Bahasa Melayu in English.

Since this is a workbook, not a reference book, let’s skip straight to the content as things like authors and design are not the most relevant.

However, I do have to say that, like other SPM books from this publisher, this book is far from colorful. However, the design is neat and easy on the eyes, with plenty of white space to keep things from appearing too cluttered and messy.

The Caveats First

First off, this workbook won’t help candidates that need this book to shoot to the front of the race and get an A. That will be an unrealistic expectation, sorry about that.

Also, for students with weaker proficiency, the use of this workbook also needs someone with the right knowledge to check the candidate’s works, preferably a teacher.

In fact, this workbook seems written for the intention of teachers getting their students to use it as homework or something and pass their work to the teachers to check.

There is also the option of looking at the back of the book for the complete answers as a guide as to whether one’s sentences are okay, but that will require a degree of sound knowledge in fundamental grammar and spelling. Not every candidate has that, and if you’re one of these candidates, it’s best to complement this workbook with lessons from a tutor.

The Content

Basically, this workbook is for writing.

For each section of Kertas 1, it offers the following:

• Sample questions with instructions
• Sample content outline
• The first few exercises of a section will ask candidates to read the pre-made introduction and conclusion, and then write the paragraphs in-between based on the outline given
• The last question of the section will present a sample outline and require the candidate to write everything from scratch based on the outline

As far as things go, this is actually pretty good practice for writing full sentences in Bahasa Melayu. Sure, the outline is given, but there’s practice in coming up appropriate kata hubung and such to string the phrases in the outline. Hopefully, the candidate will also be able to absorb how introductions and conclusions are written along the way.

There are some general information and sample useful words and phrases, but nothing is exhaustive. This is, after a workbook, so there is nothing too detailed here.

However, note that this workbook will not:

• Teach you about the flowery phrases such as peribahasa and ungkapan indah for use. Those are for candidates with good proficiency to worry about. If you really need this workbook, you will need to make sure that you can write an essay good enough to earn you a credit in the subject before you worry about getting that A!
• Teach you how to come up with points to include in your compositions.

Conclusion

• Praktis Penulisan Terbaik Bahasa Melayu SPM is the rare workbook in the market that offers candidates a chance to practice constructing sentences with sound grammar and spelling — candidates that are weak in this area will likely find this useful.
• It is also very cheap, all things considered! You get what you pay for, though — don’t expect paper of amazing quality or super durable binding. However, the content is definitely solid for its price.
• Rather than using it on its own, however, it may be a better idea to use it as a practice exercise after, say, working one’s way through Focus SPM: Bahasa Melayu, still the best reference book in the market at the moment for weaker SPM Bahasa Melayu candidates.