Florianne Jimenez and Aileen Salonga
Volume 7
Chapter Description
In this chapter, we focus on how Filipino university students think about and make sense of the notion of ‘good’ academic writing.1 We introduce a social and historical view of the entanglements between English and academic writing in the Philippines, which have resulted in an academic writing culture that remains largely preoccupied with form and structure, and English grammatical correctness. Within this broader context, we use extracts from a group of students’ reflections on their experience of academic writing to surface the challenges and difficulties, anxieties and confusion, and triumphs in the students’ writing journey. We then map these out along certain myths about academic writing, and explore the different ways by which the students negotiate these myths vis-a-vis their expecta-tions of ‘good’ academic writing and the actual material realities within which they accomplished their writing tasks. We found that students are very conscious of these so-called myths. While they did not necessarily challenge them, they nevertheless adjust to them or find a way around them, rationalizing their writing choices from the lens of their everyday re-alities, which, at that time, were mainly constrained by a complex of issues involving the lack of university infrastructure conducive to research, the mismanaged pandemic situation in the Philippines, the rampant misin-formation/disinformation campaigns that plagued the just-then concluded Philippine elections, and the resulting political turmoil and breakdown of political institutions. Overall, our chapter shows how the students were able to navigate their academic writing requirements despite having to follow standards that emerged from contexts different from theirs and while living in the midst of crises. Through this, we hope to help other students who are in a similar position realize that writing is never divorced from the social and historical contexts within which it is done, and ‘good’ academic writing is always an act of negotiation. With this view of writing, students may be better prepared to confront the social and cultural complexities underlying academic writing and become better writers in the process.
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