Keywords: problems, writing, descriptive, tenth grade students.
Descriptive writing is known as the most difficult skill which becomes problems for the students. The problems appear from the five components in writing. They should be described in order to help teachers in knowing what the main and exact problems in writing desccriptive text are.
The field research in this case is the tenth-grade of SMA Negeri-13 Banjarmasin. There are 3 parallel classes of the tenth grade. They are X-1, X-2, and X-3 classes. Each class has a population of 30 mixed students
When the description has on object which is still developing, continuous present and continuous perfect tenses will be used. With reference to the use of simple present in writing simple and short essay at the tenth grade of SMA Negeri 13 Banjarmasin, only minor problems are observed. The collected data indicate that the problems are in the level of less that 25%, and the Likert scale puts the students into good level. With reference to simple sentence building, students of the tenth grade of SMA Negeri-13 Banjarmasin are in the level of minor problems. The data says that the inability to write simple short sentence is in the level of good. With reference to simple short paragraph building, there is no serious problems observed. The level of ability is good.