Paul Matsuda: History as a Rhetorical Narrative – GO, MATSUDA, GO!

Paul Matsuda’s work was informative and relatively interesting, but most noteworthy of all—it was largely unbiased toward one school of thought as being the TRUTH. Matsuda’s primary purpose was to examine the historical definitions of current-traditional rhetoric, process, and post-process and how they apply to second language composition. I don’t think that Matsuda did all that great of a job tying in the relevance of second language composition, but his work defining a small part of composition history was very helpful.

Matsuda’s concept of paradigm comparisons has been the most unbiased and useful of all the readings I have completed in this course so far. The first clue I had that this article would be interesting was Matsuda’s statement of history in his second paragraph; he begins by staying that “the version of history that I choose to tell...” (66). With only part of a sentence, Matsuda speaks volumes about his understanding of history: it is shadowed, revisable, and a rhetorical tool for any smart enough to use it. He goes on to apply this concept with his first examination of the history of composition: “Popular lore among proponents of the process movement has it that process pedagogy arose…as a reaction to the dominance of a product-centered pedagogy, which has come to be known as current-traditional rhetoric” (67). Matsuda uses this example to show the either/or structure of perceived composition theory. Those in favor of the process pedagogy point to the past as a completely organized group of theorists that worked in absolute opposition to the current theory. He uses the insightful analogy of drawing a generalized caricature of the past to use as a defenseless punching bag and a supposed catalyst for the “new” movement, which is also perceived as being uniformed. Matsuda uses this caricature idea again when describing the supposed move from process to post-process pedagogy.

What he is really saying is that the movements in theory during the history of composition are never uniform or completely accepted by everyone working in the field. There is never a secret meeting where the English teachers of the world join together to vote on this year’s theory. Instead, change comes slowly, and for some it doesn’t come at all. The other important idea that I don’t think can be stressed enough is that theories, at least good theories, are not dropped altogether; they are altered, added to, enhanced. Current-traditional rhetoric values prescriptive grammatical structure. This idea is altered by the process pedagogy, which realigns the focus of composition toward the steps taken to compose. Can the prescriptive grammar rules be dropped? They cannot be dropped if the composer wants his writing to be understood by other speakers of English. From the theory of process, the enhancement is furthered by the addition post-process and its emphasis on the specific types of processes: expressionism, cognitive, and social. Matsuda quotes T. Kent’s writing for a more complete understanding: “[M]any authors represented in this collection – endors[e] the fundamental idea that no codifiable or generalizable writing process exists or could exist” (74). I could not agree more. Writing is a process, but there are multiple options for a compositionist to choose from. I close this entry with my favorite quote from this line, which is attributed to Pullman, “[T]he history of the writing process movement is not so much a history as a rhetorical narrative” (71). I think I would go so far as to say that this statement is true of most, if not all histories.