G. Thomas Goodnight is an American argumentation and rhetorical scholar. He is a professor and director of doctoral studies in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California USA. He has published in Communication Monographs, Communication Theory, Journal of the American Forensic Association, Quarterly Journal of Speech, and Argumentation. His seminal contribution to the field of argumentation theory lies in his approach to "spheres of argument," an idea that has sparked many scholarly studies. Before joining Annenberg, Goodnight taught doctoral courses in Northwestern University's Rhetoric Program in Contemporary Rhetorical Theory, Criticism, Argumentation, and the Public Sphere. His current research interests include deliberation and postwar society, science communication, argument and aesthetics, public discourse studies, and communicative reason in controversy. Argumentation theory, or argumentation, studies the arts and sciences of civil debate, dialogue, and conversation, using rules of inference, logic, and procedural rules in both artificial and real world settings. ...