Rhetoric's Outliers in Second Language Writing | Jay Jordan

Traditional Rhetoric

"Process and Post-Process: A Discursive History" by Paul Kei Matsuda (2003)

25 of 31 occurrences in corpus

Paul Kei Matsuda (2003) critiqued the circulation of "post-process" as a catchword in rhetoric and composition and, he observed, increasingly in L2 writing as well. Matsuda agreed with fellow L2 writing scholar Dwight Atkinson (2003) that the term's creation and use has heuristic value for opening new possibilities for scholarship; however, he expressed two related concerns. First, he sounded a general cautionary note about borrowing terms and concepts from "another site of intellectual practices" (p. 66)—a problem that he and a co-author previously noted had led to overbroad comparisons between learning to write academically on one hand and writing in a second language on the other (Matsuda & Jablonski, 2000). Second, Matsuda argued that the "post-process" label extends the straw man reasoning that characterized the "process" label. Where some process approach advocates referred derisively to "current–traditional rhetoric" as if there were one monolithic approach to composition teaching before the 1960s, scholars interested in post-process appeared to be reifying "process" in similar ways. For Matsuda, composition studies' widespread adoption of John Trimbur's (1994) label, and its connection to what Trimbur also called "the social turn," ran the risk of glossing over both process-oriented pedagogies that had existed well before the movement supposedly announced itself in the 1960s and contemporary process-oriented pedagogies that were not solely expressivist or cognitivist in orientation.

The late 20th-century development of the field of second-language writing saw a similar trend. Vivian Zamel (1976) is widely credited with formally announcing the arrival of process in L2 writing; however, Matsuda (2003) pointed to earlier process textbooks, and he also observed that process-focused and product/text-focused work (especially in the form of Contrastive Rhetoric) had long proceeded in parallel fashion in the field—an observation that calls anything like a paradigmatic status for process into question.

"Traditional" rhetoric here, then, appeared as "current–traditional rhetoric," which is less a reference to rhetoric per se and more a term that, following Daniel Fogarty's (1959) first use of it, deployed a reifying claim about a broad collection of teaching approaches.