Definition:

A disapproving term for the textbook-based methods of composition instruction popular during the first two-thirds of the 20th century. Robert J. Connors (see below) has suggested that a more neutral term, composition-rhetoric, be used instead. See also:

• Models of Composition
• Modes of Discourse
• Composition
• New Rhetoric
• Rhetoric

Etymology:

Coined by Daniel Fogarty in Roots for a New Rhetoric (1959) and popularized by Richard Young in the late 1970s.

Observations:

• "In The Principles of Rhetoric and Their Application (1878), the first and most popular of his six textbooks, [Adams Sherman] Hill emphasizes features that have come to be identified with current-traditional rhetoric: formal correctness, elegance of style, and the modes of discourse: description, narration, exposition, and argument. Persuasion, for Hill, becomes only a useful adjunct to argument, invention only a system of 'management' in a rhetoric devoted to arrangement and style."
  (Kimberly Harrison, Contemporary Composition Studies. Greenwood, 1999)
• "'Current-traditional rhetoric' became the default term for the tradition of rhetoric that appeared specifically to inform the composition courses of the latter nineteenth century and the twentieth century up through the 1960s. . . . 'Current-traditional rhetoric' as a term seemed to indicate both the outmoded nature and the continuing power of older textbook-based writing pedagogies. . . .
  
  "'Current-traditional rhetoric' became a convenient whipping boy, the term of choice after 1985 for describing whatever in nineteenth- and twentieth-century rhetorical or pedagogical history any given author found wanting. Got a contemporary problem? Blame it on current-traditional rhetoric. . . .
  
  "What we have reified as a unified 'current-traditional rhetoric' is in reality, not a unified or an unchanging reality."
  (Robert J. Connors, Composition-Rhetoric. Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1997)