Argumentative Discourse: From Strategic Maneuvering to Argumentative Style

by Frans H. van Eemeren, Ton Van Haaften

Blending theory and practice, this book outlines the central role that strategic maneuvering and argumentative style play in argumentative discourse. Strategic maneuvering refers to the functional connection arguers create between aiming for effectiveness and maintaining reasonableness, which they pursue simultaneously in argumentative discourse. Argumentative style is the specific argumentative shape arguers give to their strategic maneuvering.

Enabling students to understand how they can successfully prepare oral and written argumentative discourse, this book provides a pragma-dialectical approach to argumentation. It demonstrates what is involved in approaching argumentative discourse from the perspective of strategic maneuvering and allows students to put their skills and knowledge into practice through end-of-chapter exercises. It also provides readers with a set of rules for choosing between reasonable and fallacious argumentative moves and a series of recommendations for selecting argumentative styles.

Written by leading experts, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of Argumentation, Communication Studies, Linguistics, Philosophy, and Law.

Kindle Edition

Expected publication March 18, 2026

About the author

Frans Hendrik van Eemeren is a Dutch scholar, professor in the Department of Speech Communication, Argumentation Theory and Rhetoric at the University of Amsterdam. He is noted for his Pragma-dialectics theory, an argumentation theory which he developed with Rob Grootendorst from the early 1980s onwards. He has published numerous books and papers, including Strategic Maneuvering in Argumentative Discourse.

Frans H. van Eemeren together with Rob Grootendorst, developed pragma-dialectics, or pragma-dialectical theory, at the University of Amsterdam. It is an argumentation theory that is used to analyze and evaluate argumentation in actual practice. Unlike strictly logical approaches (which focus on the study of argument as product), or purely communication approaches (which emphasize argument as a process), pragma-dialectics was developed to study the entirety of an argumentation as a discourse activity. Thus, the pragma-dialectical theory views argumentation as a complex speech act that occurs as part of natural language activities and has specific communicative goals.