Journal of Second Language Writing

12 (2003) 49–63

Writing and culture in the post-process era

Dwight Atkinson*
Graduate College of Education, Temple University Japan, 2-8-12 Minami Azabu,
Minato-ku, Tokyo 106-0047, Japan

Abstract

Does the notion of culture, currently under wide-ranging critique across the social
sciences, still have a future? In this paper I discuss three possible uses of the culture concept
in the field of second language writing for the 21st century: (1) Turning the cultural lens
back on ourselves (where ‘‘ourselves’’ means the very academics who have found the
concept most useful in the past); (2) Investigating continuity, universality, and hybridity,
whereas the culture concept has traditionally been used to investigate difference, localiza-
tion, and cultural ‘‘purity’’; and (3) Expanding, contracting, and complexifying the scope
of the culture concept. I conclude by arguing for a view of L2 writing that takes into account
the full range of social and cultural contexts impacting L2 writing, rather than focusing
narrowly on skills and processes of writing (in the classroom) in themselves.
# 2002 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Culture; Post-process; Post-modernism; Second language writing; Reflexivity; Critical

applied linguistics

A view of second language writing which emphasizes its rich embeddedness in

the world — rather than a perspective based largely or wholly in classroom
practice — would give a central place to the notion of culture. But culture itself is
a dangerous concept these days, and for good reason: It appears to carry so much
baggage that it may well present more trouble than it’s worth. As a result, many
wish to banish it, replacing it with notions such as ‘‘identity,’’ ‘‘power,’’
‘‘hybridity,’’ and ‘‘resistance’’ (e.g., Abu-Lughod, 1991; Atkinson, 1999a; Bor-
ofsky, Barth, Shweder, Roseth, & Stolzenberg, 2001; Brightman, 1995; Brumann,
1999; Heath, 1997; Shore, 1996). In this paper I take an alternative position —
that while the potential for misuse of the culture concept is quite real, this need not

*
Tel.: þ81-3-5441-9851; fax: þ81-3-5441-9822.
E-mail address: dwightatki@aol.com (D. Atkinson).

1060-3743/02/$ – see front matter # 2002 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/S1060-3743(02)00126-1
50 D. Atkinson / Journal of Second Language Writing 12 (2003) 49–63

blind one to its other, potentially positive functions. I believe that it is important to
see what new and different possibilities concepts like culture can yield before
banishing them forever.1
The case against culture, however, is prima facie a strong one. In the 19th
century it was linked to the idea that peoples existed on scales of ‘‘civilized $
uncivilized,’’ ‘‘primitive $ advanced’’ (Eagleton, 2000; Kuper, 1999). Matthew
Arnold’s definition of culture as ‘‘the best that has been known and said’’ (1873,
cited in Kuper, 1999, p. 9) in the world at least implicitly acknowledges this
important strain. Although the relationship was by no means as simple as some
commentators assume (Brightman, 1995; Eagleton, 2000; Gilbert-Moore, 1997;
Stocking, 1968), the notion of culture was also typically bound up with colo-
nialism. Theories of racial/ethnic superiority were therefore often tied to beliefs
and positions on culture in the 19th century.
The birth of modern anthropology in the late 19th and early 20th centuries has
itself been strongly linked to various strains in colonialist culture. The romantic
notion that one could live with ‘‘the other’’ and somehow make them one’s own
(or vice-versa) had both pro-colonialist and anti-colonialist origins — the two
parts of the term ‘‘noble savage’’ itself signify colonial contradictions. The
pioneer anthropological participant–observer Malinowski famously quoted
Joseph Conrad’s ‘‘Exterminate the brutes’’ (Malinowski, 1967, p. 69) to capture
part of his complex attitude toward the people he was studying, at the same time as
he was writing: ‘‘[T]o study the behavior and mentality without the subjective
desire of feeling by what these people live — of realising the substance of their
happiness — is, in my opinion, to miss the greatest reward which we can hope to
obtain from the study of man [sic]’’ (Malinowski, 1922/1961, p. 25).
And yet the notion of culture developed by anthropologists during the 20th
century, and which itself has borne the brunt of criticism at century’s end,
directly rejected scales of the ‘‘primitive $ civilized’’ kind, and tenets of
evolutionary, racial, and cultural superiority (e.g., Benedict, 1940/1957; Boas,
1974). That it could not wholly overcome the influence of the environment in
which it was produced (Stocking, 1968) does not lessen its power and impor-
tance in 20th-century progressive thought. Explicitly anti-racist and anti-evolu-
tionist in origin, this ‘‘relativist’’ notion of culture allowed the systematic
possibility — quite probably for the first time in human history — of seeing
those with lifeways substantially different than one’s own first and foremost as
people. No matter how intensely criticized in recent times, the relativist view of
culture was clearly a signal advance in thinking — a genuine if rare mark of

1
I do not mean to suggest here that there has been a widespread movement in L2 writing to banish
the notion of culture from the field. But current influential questionings of culture in the field (e.g.,
Kubota, 1999; Zamel, 1997) — as well as occasional more categorical rejections (e.g., Spack, 1997)
— all derive from the same general critique of the concept that has been ongoing in anthropology,
cultural studies, and other fields, and which often results in attempts to replace it, in whole or in part,
with alternative concepts (see, e.g., Abu-Lughod, 1991; Atkinson, 2000; Borofsky et al., 2001;
Brumann, 1999; Shore, 1996; Heath, 1997).
 D. Atkinson / Journal of Second Language Writing 12 (2003) 49–63 51

progress for humankind. The case against culture, then, while prima facie a
strong one, is by no means closed. Culture has had powerful, positive influences
as well in the 20th century.

Culture for the 21st century?

Given its variegated career to this point, a reasonable question becomes: What
possibilities has the notion of culture to offer in the 21st century? More
specifically, what additional positive functions can it serve as a thinking and
seeing tool vis-à-vis L2 writing in our rapidly changing world. In what follows, I
would like to speculate on three such possible uses, emphasizing functions of the
culture concept that forthrightly attempt to address some of the issues raised by its
recent critique — in other words, by making the culture concept substantially
more flexible and reflexive. By introducing these points I am also attempting, in
keeping with the theme and intent of this special issue, to situate L2 writing more
deeply and complexly in the modern (or post-modern — some might also add
‘‘post-cultural’’) world.

Turning culture back on ourselves

The first and foremost usefulness of culture in L2 writing, as I see it, is to turn
the cultural viewing lens critically and reflexively back on ourselves and our own
practices. By ‘‘ourselves,’’ I am actually referring here to a relatively small
segment of the earth’s population, but one that has disproportionate power in
academia: I mean the people who define what counts in terms of academic
writing in English, especially ‘‘good’’ academic writing. These include, of
course, academics and teachers of academic writing themselves, as well as those
who come from middle class groups in the U.S. and beyond which place special
emphasis on maintaining or elevating their socioeconomic status through
educational ‘‘achievement’’ (e.g., Bourdieu, 1982; Gee, 1990; Heath, 1983,
chap. 7). Obviously, English has a highly privileged place in the hierarchy of
languages used for academic purposes (e.g., Crystal, 1997; Swales, 1990), so it is
important to acknowledge and deal with this issue — this much is made clear in
the quotation (Gee, 1990, pp. 67–68) concluding the introduction to this special
issue:
The English teacher can cooperate in her own marginalization by seeing herself
as a ‘‘language teacher’’ [and, I would add, specifically, ‘‘as a writing teacher’’
— author’s note] with no connection to . . . social and political issues. Or she can
. . . accept her role as one who socializes students into a world view that, given its
power [in the U.S.] and abroad, must be viewed critically, comparatively, and
with a constant sense of the possibilities for change. Like it or not, the English
teacher stands at the very heart of the most crucial educational, cultural, and
political issues of our time.
52 D. Atkinson / Journal of Second Language Writing 12 (2003) 49–63

By suggesting that the cultural viewing lens be turned critically back on at least
some of those who have primarily used it, I am proposing that L2 writing needs to
devote greater attention to the more-or-less tacit and unthinking social and
cultural practices (e.g., Atkinson, 1997; Berger & Luckmann, 1966; Polanyi,
1958) which continuously operate in our contexts as academic writers, writing
teachers, and members of various sociocultural groups. Having done so, we must
then attempt to ascertain the significance of these cultural practices for people
from other parts of the world who are likely to come into contact with them. In the
following paragraphs, I introduce several issues which could, in my opinion,
profitably undergo such analytical scrutiny. In each case I then speculate at length
on what such investigations might find, providing bibliographical references
where preliminary work has already been done. In taking this approach, I intend
only to introduce example possibilities and some directions in which they might
be developed, rather than to make confident and dogmatic assertions.
A first set of culturally reflexive questions one might profitably ask concerns the
connection between so-called ‘‘essayist literacy’’ (e.g., Gee, 1990; Scollon &
Scollon, 1981) and capitalism. For example, why do academic writing teachers and
at least some academic writers deify ‘‘clear writing,’’ if not as part of a functional
system in which efficiency and speed of delivery are central — in which written
knowledge is defined as a movable, transposable, commercial phenomenon —
literacy-as-commodity, if you will? In this area L2 writing researchers could
examine such notions as thesis statements, advance organizers, point-driven
writing, charts and graphs, and, yes, plagiarism or textual ownership, as performing
action in a larger world economic system (Lyotard, 1979; Berlin, 1988), rather than
as issues related merely to ‘‘getting the job done.’’ And having done so, one would
then be bound to ask what it means to prepare people from other parts of the world
to undertake such social and cultural activity.2
Let me now speculate on possible answers to this first set of questions. To begin
with, consider the fact that writing in many U.S. university writing classrooms
(e.g., Atkinson & Ramanathan, 1995) seems to ‘‘be in a hurry.’’ Student are often
guided to place their main point/claim quite early in the essay — to produce ‘‘top-
down,’’ or ‘‘thesis-driven’’ writing. This emphasis on speed and efficiency then
continues in the teacher’s insistence that each paragraph or group of paragraphs be
about a ‘‘single point’’; that that point be separate from/exclusive of all other such

2
By suggesting that the ‘‘essayist-literacy’’ approach to writing puts a premium on clarity, I do not
mean to reject the idea that ‘‘clarity’’ is also culturally understood and constructed. In his pioneering
work on Contrastive Rhetoric (CR), Robert B. Kaplan (1966) made the mistake of visually portraying
‘‘the’’ rhetorical style of U.S. academic writing as a straight line — in other words as a wholly linear
rhetoric. Preferred rhetorical styles in other languages and in other parts of the world by contrast were
depicted as vortexes, zig-zags, and the like. As Kaplan himself and many others have pointed out
repeatedly since then, there is a category error here — the U.S. approach was characterized from an
insider’s perspective, while the others were characterized from an outsider’s perspective (and on the
basis of biblical translations and L2 writings, among other kinds of texts). Without a doubt, clarity to
a substantial degree is in the eyes of the beholder.
 D. Atkinson / Journal of Second Language Writing 12 (2003) 49–63 53

points; that that single point often if not always be highlighted — once again
usually early in its paragraph/s; that the main points of these paragraphs be
supported by concrete evidence and examples; and that the paragraphs or
paragraph series thus constructed be linked together under the thesis in a clear,
unified, top-down ‘‘control structure.’’ Speed and efficiency are also often
similarly reflected in rigid requirements for standardization and correctness
regarding many aspects of a paper’s physical appearance — from word-proces-
sing in particular type sizes with particular margin settings on particular kinds of
paper, to various other style guidelines including citation formats, to near-
errorless perfection of grammar and mechanics, in ‘‘standard English.’’3
From my point of view, this emphasis on efficient writing is virtually synon-
ymous with an emphasis on clear writing — if the writing is clear, in other words,
then readers can process the text easily and efficiently. They don’t have to spend
precious time puzzling over the author’s meaning, which should be highly
transparent — in some cases almost visually/iconically represented on the page.
Scholars such as Bazerman (1988) have even shown how high degrees of
discourse transparency in some academic writing allow for selective, non-linear
reading based on highly functional search strategies, such as that by which
scientists hunt for ‘‘new information’’ in their areas of specialization (see also
Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1995, chap. 2).4
But how is such an approach to writing implicated in the world beyond the U.S.
university writing classroom — i.e., as an economically functional practice of
‘‘late capitalism’’ (Jameson, 1984)? As part of a system of which perhaps the
deepest truth is in fact ‘‘time is money’’ (Gee, 1990; Gee, Hull, & Lankshear,
1996), I would like to suggest that the rather definite and particular shape and
qualities of much academic, job-related, and school-based writing are functional
in at least two immediate senses: (1) for the recipient/audience, to get capital (in
the case of academic writing, largely symbolic capital — Bourdieu, 1986)
transferred to them as speedily and efficiently and therefore with as little loss
of value as possible and (2) for the producer (or more accurately her employer), to
get a capital-generating task accomplished as quickly and efficiently as possible,
for the purpose of freeing up time in which additional such tasks can be
accomplished, and additional capital thereby accumulated. Of course, the actual
3
The economic functionality of ‘‘Standard English’’ itself — a subject about which much has been
written — is clearly represented in places like the U.S. in the regular ‘‘standard speaker’’ response to
the English of groups of ‘‘non-standard’’ speakers: ‘‘How are they ever going to succeed in the world
of business with English like that? How will people ever understand them?’’ Clearly, the teaching of
‘‘Standard English’’ is a hallowed feature and main claim to power of the U.S. university at large, and
communicative efficiency and clarity are important supposed benefits of such teaching.
4
St. Pierre (2000, p. 478) makes some interesting, related comments on clarity in academic
writing, in response to reactions from various parts of the Academy to the writings of post-modernist
feminists: ‘‘‘Clarity’ is always a distinction made through positions of power both to sanction what is
legitimate and to keep the unfamiliar at a distance and illegitimate. Some suspect that the call for
clarity is also part of the American discourse of anti-intellectualism that, on some level, assumes that
the ordinary person cannot understand complexity.’’
54 D. Atkinson / Journal of Second Language Writing 12 (2003) 49–63

activity of writing in the university composition classroom is in important ways

simulated activity, but its rationale and organization often derive directly from its
assumed functionality in students’ future lives, particularly as workers and
knowledge producers (cf., Lyotard, 1979).5
Additional patterns in the writing advocated by many university writing
programs can also be related to the needs and constraints of late capitalism, some
of which are well-known. The emphasis on ‘‘originality,’’ for example, and the
vilification of ‘‘plagiarism’’ seem to be rather direct reflexes of property rights in
the context of highly legalized private ownership (Pennycook, 1994, 1996; Scollon,
1995). Like other kinds of property, particular formulations of words and ideas are
their owner’s sole possession — they can be had by others for approved purposes,
but only in an economy of material or symbolic payment/exchange (Bourdieu,
1977). The teaching of citation forms and practices for ‘‘research papers’’ is one
manifestation of such concerns in university writing classrooms. From the point of
view of many in the world who do not necessarily share the same socioeconomic
ideology, such a position may be extreme and even contradictory (Fox, 1994;
Pennycook, 1996; Ramanathan & Atkinson, 1999; Scollon, 1995).
Likewise, the emphasis in many university writing programs on argumentation
seems to have a basis in late capitalism. Through competition in the production
and marketing of new products — in this case largely intellectual ones —
societies reach higher forms of ‘‘the good’’ — in this case better intellectual
products. The ‘‘invisible hand’’ of classical free-market economics thus asserts
itself in the writing classroom in the form of ‘‘argumentation’’ and ‘‘critical
thinking’’ (Atkinson, 1997).
A second area in which the critical lens of culture might be turned back on its
traditional users themselves concerns the connections between dominant con-
ventions of academic writing and an ideology of individualism. In the U.S. and
other places there is a dominant, culturally defined notion of the individual that
highlights his or her unique traits, originary voice, voluntary actions, and (often)
apparent resistance to pre-existing social categories (e.g., Bellah, Madsen,
Sullivan, Swidler, & Tipton, 1985; Taylor, 1989). The irony of course is that
this version of self is just as socially defined as any other, despite the fact that
along with other such social practices it is naturalized — that is, a social fact taken
for a natural one (Bakhtin, 1990, p. 935; Marx, 1978, p. 321). What does the
pervasive influence of this ideology of individualism mean for the way academic
writing is taught and undertaken — for the expectations that are commonly
held for academic writers-in-training, particularly those from different social and
cultural backgrounds?
5
This assumption is revealed, indirectly, through the major and continuing debate in composition
studies over the appropriateness of a generalized ‘‘freshman writing’’ type approach in teaching at
least the first course in undergraduate writing in the U.S., versus a more focused (but often still quite
general) ‘‘writing in the disciplines’’ approach: One of the key issues in this debate is how well the
generalized approach prepares students for their future worlds of work (e.g., Bartholomae, 1998/
1999). For one position on this debate in L2 writing, see Ramanathan and Kaplan (2000).
 D. Atkinson / Journal of Second Language Writing 12 (2003) 49–63 55

Since I have begun to deal with this issue in other work (Atkinson, 2001;
Ramanathan & Atkinson, 1999), and since it is closely related to the above-
hypothesized relationship between ‘‘clarity’’ and capitalism, let me limit my
comments here to a few thoughts about the history of this connection. In so doing I
intend to suggest that history should have a central role in such endeavors — as a
powerful means of deconstructing social practices that may now seem as natural
as the air we breathe, but which have by no means always been so. By looking
backwards across time, it is possible to see how contingent and tentative human
activity becomes subsumed into ‘‘common sense’’ — ‘‘natural,’’ highly institu-
tionalized behavior within sociocultural groups (Atkinson, 1996, 1999b; Fou-
cault, 1972; Latour, 1987).
Historically, the connection between the school-based writing practices of
‘‘essayist literacy’’ and the crystallization of the Western essay form in Mon-
taigne’s radically individualistic ‘‘essaies,’’ as well as in early modern scientific
writing, is patent (e.g., Paradis, 1987). The relationship between such writing
practices and those associated with economic functionality mentioned above
appears to be close if complex — among other things, a free-market system
assumes an individualist ideology of competition and survival of the economic-
ally fittest.
Likewise, the concept of textual ownership arose with the cult of individual
authorship (Barthes, 1977; Foucault, 1977a), both of them resulting from the
complex, interrelated development of social individuation and early democratic
capitalism, including ‘‘print capitalism’’ (Anderson, 1983; Johns, forthcoming).
According to Foucault (1977a), modern democracy and modern capitalism had
their roots in various ‘‘technologies of discipline’’ by which human beings were
turned into ‘‘individuals’’:
The chief function of the [modern] disciplinary power is to ‘train,’ rather than to
select and to levy . . .. Instead of bending all its subjects into a single uniform
mass, it separates, analyses, differentiates, carries its procedures of decomposi-
tion to the point of necessary and sufficient single units. It ‘trains’ the moving,
confused, useless multitudes of bodies and forces into a multiplicity of individual
elements — small, separate cells, organic autonomies, genetic identities and
continuities, combinatory segments. Discipline makes individuals; it is the
specific technique of a power that regards individuals both as objects and as
instruments of its exercise . . .. (p. 170)

If the economic take-off of the West began with the techniques that made
possible the accumulation of capital, it might perhaps be said that the methods of
administering the accumulation of men [sic] made possible a political take-off
. . .. In fact, the two processes — the accumulation of men [sic] and the
accumulation of capital — cannot be separated; it would not have been possible
to solve the problem of the accumulation of men [sic] without the growth of an
apparatus of production capable of both sustaining them and using them;
conversely, the techniques that made the cumulative multiplicity of men [sic]
useful accelerated the accumulation of capital. (pp. 220–221)
56 D. Atkinson / Journal of Second Language Writing 12 (2003) 49–63

The increasing legalization of textual ownership from the Enlightenment up to

the present thus demonstrates its essential integration into a social and economic
system whereby individual production and consumption substantially define the
individual — one’s identity in a free-market economy is closely related to what
one produces and consumes. The rights described in the writings of John Locke,
Thomas Jefferson, and others, although not yet based wholly in this system, take
part of their rationale from at least the producer’s right — in fact responsibility —
to so define himself [sic].
This principle carries over into educational contexts, including academic
writing instruction, as much as it does into other areas of social life. It is small
wonder, then, that concepts like ‘‘originality’’ and ‘‘textual ownership’’ become
such major (and undefinable) concepts in such settings, since, to put it somewhat
programmatically, ‘‘you are what you produce.’’
Third and finally in the interest of turning the critical, cultural lens back on
academics themselves, let us investigate what is tacitly assumed in the use of
terms such as ‘‘logic,’’ ‘‘reason,’’ and ‘‘argument’’ — terms that have too long
been granted an uncritical place in academic writing, as well as society at large.
Most crucially, let’s do so before assuming their unproblematic universality
across social and cultural groups (Atkinson, 1997).
Fortunately, scholars re-envisioning the world in terms of post-modernist and
feminist perspectives have been laying the groundwork here for further study in
recent years, beginning perhaps with Foucault (e.g., Foucault, 1977b; see also
Gilligan, 1981; Haraway, 1988; Kuhn, 1970; St. Pierre, 2000). Among their basic
arguments is that reason, like other concepts, is a human invention, and therefore
part and parcel of the messy, nonsystematic, self-interested behavior that humans
habitually engage in — in short, that it is hardly an ‘‘objective’’ and universally
valid means by which ‘‘truth’’ can be located or intellectual problems resolved.
Furthermore, if reason is a human invention then there must also be multiple
species of reason, because humans themselves are multiple — culturally as well
as in other ways. One can therefore talk of ‘‘legal reasoning’’ and ‘‘scientific
reasoning,’’ ‘‘men’s reasoning’’ and ‘‘women’s reasoning,’’ ‘‘traditional Chinese
logic’’ and ‘‘(Western) formal logic,’’ etc. Obviously, such labels should not be
given any more of a privileged position than the supposedly universal concepts of
‘‘reason’’ or ‘‘logic’’ they are meant to complement or replace — proof can only
be obtained by engaging in careful social and cultural investigation (e.g., Porter,
1995; Shapin, 1994). Nor should such descriptors be taken to cover all and only
the possible reasoning capabilities of any particular cultural group or individual
— all human beings obviously share a core of common reasoning abilities without
which they could not survive even a single day, not to mention the fact that various
modern intellectual traditions are deeply intertwined and interacting.
To bring the discussion directly back to L2 writing, the point here is that when any
L2 writing teacher questions a student’s ‘‘logic,’’ or the relevance of the student’s
arguments, or the fitness of the ‘‘evidence’’ by which they are supported (or even
simply when employing commonsense notions like ‘‘support’’ or ‘‘argument’’ or
 D. Atkinson / Journal of Second Language Writing 12 (2003) 49–63 57

‘‘evidence’’ or ‘‘critical thinking’’ in one’s teaching), that teacher needs to acknowl-

edge and understand his/her participation in particular ‘‘language games’’ —
socioculturally influenced way of thinking, being, and teaching in the world, the
universal common sense of which should never just be assumed. Indeed, I have been
suggesting that the field of L2 writing needs to do rather more than simply
acknowledge and understand the potential variability covered up by such notions
— it needs an active research agenda which questions, challenges, and, where
necessary, revises them if L2 writing is to be taught wisely and ethically, at the same
time testing the usefulness of the culture concept in the 21st century.

Investigating continuity, universality, hybridity

A second possible research area for the new study of culture in writing has to do
with the fact that L2 writing research has focused heavily to this point on the
dichotomous nature of cultural traits in its cross-cultural comparisons. So why
not, at this point, shift the lens so that we can see continuously rather than
dichotomously? Instead of seeing particular practices as exclusively or ‘‘natu-
rally’’ based in specific cultural settings, for example, let’s look at the broad and
specific influences that cut across cultures — that tend to break down and throw
into question those contrastive cultural differences (Ochs, 1996). Very few texts
— or any other cultural products — are culturally pure. So let’s look at cross-
breeding or hybridity for a change rather than exclusively at the differences.
While this suggestion may sound like a preliminary move toward doing away
with the culture concept altogether (e.g., Spack, 1997), in fact it still clearly
assumes an active and robust notion of culture. As has been pointed out in various
places (e.g., Young, 1995), concepts like ‘‘hybridity’’ themselves presuppose pre-
existing sociocultural phenomena which are not hybrid — that is, hybridization
needs something to operate on. The same goes, as well, for other concepts which
emphasize cross-cutting influences and blendings across cultures, such as ‘‘con-
tact zones,’’ ‘‘borderlands,’’ ‘‘border crossings,’’ and ‘‘transculturation.’’
To take a prominent example of how cultural practices might be looked at more
continuously, consider one of L2 writing’s favorite (and most confused) notions:
Contrastive Rhetoric (CR). Despite some preliminary moves in a more positive
direction (e.g., Connor, in press), CR has been saddled for years with a received
notion of culture that quite simply does not allow a flexible, dynamic, and
continuous way of looking at texts, either L1 or L2. There are innumerable genres,
styles, text-types, and registers in any large-scale, modern, national or linguistic
culture — each with its own more or less institutionalized discourse conventions
— so any generalization of the sort ‘‘Writing in English is linear’’ has got to be
wrong on the face of it.6 Anyone who has ever read philosophy, confessional
6
In this connection, I find it ironic that the originator of this idea in applied linguistics, Robert B.
Kaplan, long ago disavowed it (Kaplan, 1987). Yet, as Kaplan himself would no doubt acknowledge,
it seems to have taken on a life of its own, and Kaplan keeps getting cited (pro and especially con —
e.g., Canagarajah, 1999) on its behalf.
58 D. Atkinson / Journal of Second Language Writing 12 (2003) 49–63

poetry, letters from home, modernist literature, suspense fiction, diaries, ethno-
graphic fieldnotes, or for that matter at least some academic writing written in
English (e.g., much literary or social criticism over the past 20 years, e.g.,
Bernstein, 1972; Eagleton, 2000; Sedgwick, 1991) should be fully aware of this
fact. In more traditional forms of academic writing in English as well, there are
disciplines and institutions which reject top-down, formulaic linearity in pre-
ference to more ‘‘sophisticated’’ approaches to writing, as Vai Ramanathan and I
found in our study of a large U.S. university writing program (Atkinson &
Ramanathan, 1995).
None of this is to say that there aren’t norms that are possibly generalizable (to
some extent) for various forms of writing — only that to this point such arguments
have not been very persuasively made. Certainly, there seems to be widespread
‘‘teacher knowledge’’ among L2 writing teachers that some such differences
exist, perhaps especially between ‘‘English’’ academic rhetorics and those of East
Asian provenance. But to relate all differences unproblematically to single
putative national styles — e.g., English ‘‘linear prose,’’ or Japanese ‘‘ki-sho-
ten-ketsu’’ — flies in the face both of commonly available evidence and hundreds
of years of cross-cultural exchange, hybridity, borrowing, and indigenization.
Why not study non-English academic rhetorics, for example, from a perspective
that does not attempt to contrast — to dichotomize and differentiate — so much as
to compare: to see the common functional bases and cross-cutting origins that
simply must exist at the current stage of world capitalism/globalization.7 New or
revised views of culture (e.g., Atkinson, 1999a; Harklau, 1999) that do not
presuppose exclusive dichotomies can help us substantially in this regard.

Expanding, contracting, and complexifying the notion of culture

The third and final area of research in L2 writing that might take its point of
departure in a reflexive and revised notion of culture concerns the very scope of
the concept itself. It has frequently been assumed in recent years that national
boundaries are the relevant delimiting feature of distinct cultures — the so-called
‘‘peoples-and-cultures’’ view (Gupta & Ferguson, 1996, p. 1). But this seems to
me a narrow, unempirical, and unfortunate way of thinking, unless we are satisfied
with equating cultural ways of knowing, doing, and being substantially with
relatively recent nation-state ideologies (Anderson, 1983). In other words, let
us play with the notion of culture a bit: Let’s stretch it out, or shrink it down;
let’s look at culture across a variety of cross-cutting domains, modalities and
sizes, including prominently what Adrian Holliday (1999) calls ‘‘small cultures.’’
These might include classrooms as cultures (Breen, 1985), specific educational
7
With the hope of incorporating this aim into the CR agenda, I have for several years been
advocating that CR’s name be changed to something like ‘‘cross-cultural discourse studies.’’ While a
name change in itself will not solve any problems, it could have the desirable effect of symbolizing
and possibly encouraging a more substantive reorientation (see Connor, in press, for other efforts in
this direction).
 D. Atkinson / Journal of Second Language Writing 12 (2003) 49–63 59

institutions as cultures, disciplines as cultures, as well as the overlapping interac-

tive relationships among and across such cultures (see Holliday, 1994, p. 29, for a
stimulating visual representation and discussion). To give a slightly more concrete
example, what is the influence of international youth cultures built around music
(e.g., hip-hop), or youth literacy practices such as graffitti, on the way students
think about their participation in formal educational settings, including L2 writing
classrooms? From a traditional point of view, such practices might seem to be
directly opposed to or exclusive of academic writing; but if one takes seriously the
principle of really attempting to know one’s students culturally (Atkinson, 1999a;
Ramanathan & Atkinson, 1999), such knowledge might have new and largely
unpredictable uses in the writing classroom and research settings. Canagarajah
(1997, 1998) has made a start in studying such phenomena in terms of ‘‘classroom
underlife’’ and sociocultural ‘‘safehouses’’ in L1 settings (see also the classic
work of Willis, 1977; Shuman, 1986) but let’s find out more about how they
operate in the L2 context.

Conclusion

During the writing of this paper, I have almost been able to hear future readers
impatiently commenting, ‘‘Fine — but what on earth does this have to do with
actually teaching L2 writing, for goodness’ sake?’’ This is a reasonable question
in several respects, so let me end by trying to answer it.
One can only teach — or at least teach well — what one knows. So if I respond
to the initial question with another question, ‘‘What is this thing called L2 writing
that you profess to teach, and profess to want to know this paper’s relation to?’’
and the reader then answers: ‘‘A set of skills or processes which, having learned,
my students can better do what they want to do and be what they want to be,’’ I will
reply that you do not know what you are teaching. The whole thrust of my
argument in this paper — not to mention the major problematic of this special
issue — is that what we call L2 writing is infinitely more than what it has
traditionally been conceptualized as — a decontextualized set of skills or
processes by which we complete our academic, or job-related, or other tasks,
and then at the end of the day head home, secure in the knowledge that we have
done what we were trained to do.
My own understanding of L2 writing — in fact writing in general — is
precisely the opposite. If you have engaged in job-related writing, for example,
you have also engaged in the whole functional-economic system of (so-called)
free-market exchange — you have played your role, occupied your personal
position in this system. Your individual enacting of this system has consequences
— not just for yourself but for all others who it impacts, both positively and
negatively. In Foucault’s terms, you have participated in a discourse, and it is
therefore your responsibility to understand and if necessary to modify your
actions (Gee, 1990) — with knowledge comes ethical responsibility.
60 D. Atkinson / Journal of Second Language Writing 12 (2003) 49–63

Things may seem rather different in the L2 writing classroom. But there too I
would argue that teachers occupy particular subject positions — positions that in
most cases are provided us largely pre-built socially and culturally. But if we as
teachers are to fill them well and responsibly — or rather do more than simply fill
them, with all the complacency and lack of active understanding that that implies —
it behooves us to know at some level of sophistication what these subject positions
actually are. When, in responding to a student’s essay, I ask that student to state or
clarify his or her ‘‘thesis’’ at the paper’s beginning, I may very well be participating
in a much larger discourse or ideology of the type I speculated on earlier; e.g., a
functional economic system, or individualist ideology. Obviously, this kind of
request comes from somewhere — it is not simply produced from notions in my
head at the moment I read the student’s essay. There is little if any ‘‘innocent,’’
decontextualized, skills-only teaching activity or knowledge operating in the L2
writing classroom from this point of view — it is basically all social action. This
should not be so surprising considering a number of realities — including the fact
that society actually rewards us financially for teaching or researching academic
writing, often continuously over substantial periods of our lives.
Visions of writing research and teaching which focus largely on issues of skill
development or decontextualized writing processes seem to slight if not virtually
eliminate many exciting and important possibilities from the field. By connecting
the teaching, learning, and using of written language around the world to
performing various kinds of sociocognitive activity in that world the field of
L2 writing is broadened out, deepened, and made more relevant. It is most of all in
this direction — what Holliday (1996) calls developing a sociological imagina-
tion — that I hope to see our field grow and prosper. And it is in this way, I believe,
that the notion of culture may still make substantial contributions to our field.

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